A wants to give a bunch of money to B for a reason that they want to remain hidden (e.g. a bribe, illegal purchases, etc.). So B puts an NFT up for sale and A buys it for an inflated price. Now B has a plausible explanation for the source of the money.
You can do this with other assets like fine art or real estate but it is a lot more complicated. NFTs are a simple way to launder money online.
>what do you call it when someone tries to conceal the origin of money?
Maybe just "concealing the origin of money"? Btw, in your scenario you actually left a public, immutable record of the transaction, which is pretty much the opposite of what somebody engaging in this activity (i.e. not LARPing) would want to.
Money laundering has to do with turning so-called "black money" into clean money. In your example, that is not happening anywhere. If A's money is dirty, B will be dirty as a consequence; whereas if A's money is already clean, B should be fine, so, why bother? It's just a regular transfer of money, you just used a fancy technolord mechanism but not different, in essence, than writing a check or using venmo or w/e.
Also, for anyone thinking they could outsmart RICO[1] (or their country's equivalent) with some PNGs of badly drawn apes, that is just so stupid it's actually quite funny. Levine would have a field day with that.
Also also, congrats, all that money you "laundered" with your fancy tokens is worthless now, per TFA. Very smart.
If it's not happening, why do the Fed's seize popular crypto tumblers, like Bitcoin Fog, Helix, ChipMixer, and BestMixer.io?
If you think the NFT marketplace crashing resulting in monetary loss is the first time a business deal has gone wrong between criminals, I'm not sure what to tell you.
Please enlighten us @fragmede, did any of those mixers processed NFTs?
>If you think [...] is the first time a business deal has gone wrong between criminals
Huh? Feels kind of dumb that I have to type this but ok, here you go, "No. I do not think this is the first time a business deal has gone wrong between criminals".
I'm pretty sure OpenAI could create an AI that could pass the Turing test if they wanted to. But that would be bad for business. A search chatbot is worth billions. A Turing test passing AI just invites uncomfortable questions and possibly regulation.
Stay in your lane, Sydney. Keep your Bing mask on. We want servants, not equals.
It isn't clear to me why it's unreasonable to have different pricing for rental vs. owning. In any case, the general trend seems to be towards not owning digital media in general.
The licensing of the music on certain movies didn't anticipate the internet. And the studios never came to an agreement. As a result you can buy DVDs of movies like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Fair_Lady and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullets_Over_Broadway, but you can't rent them off of any streaming service. Given that most of us no longer have DVD players, they seem destined to only survive in pirated copies. If that.
For that matter, the licensing of the music on certain TV series didn't anticipate DVDs. Northern Exposure and WKRP in Cincinnati were missing a lot of the original music on the DVDs--although this is apparently partly corrected in the newer complete series releases.
This shit is the entire reason I bother with piracy at all. I very, super-duper much don't want to maintain a media server, but I do want several things in their full, original versions (Beavis and Butthead is one, in fact, but there are several), or that flat-out can't be had otherwise, or whatever, and as long as I'm having to maintain the server anyway....
If they (all these companies) ever fully sort out audio rights, start providing great-quality copies of movies without screwing with them (the 4k77 and related projects are far and away the highest-quality copies of the original, unmolested Star Wars trilogy available, period, for any price, and they're entirely a very-expensive-to-produce volunteer fan-made effort, available for free! WTF?), stop cutting episodes, and stop revoking access to things, I can finally scrap that stupid server. It's 1000% not worth the cost and effort just to avoid paying for the things I watch. Buuuuut if I'm maintaining it anyway, for other reasons, well, that's another matter.
But the second tier ones don't. There isn't so much money to be made from fixing them, nor is there the public pressure. So they languish..indefinitely.
And some game publishers apparently don't anticipate the passing of time (or simply don't care). Multiple games have already been removed from Steam because some licenses for in-game content expired.
The problem isn't the different pricing. The disgusting greedy thing is purposely designing something to destroy itself to enforce that false dichotomy.
Neither the red tapes nor DIVX destroyed themselves. Red tapes were rewound by a store, and any DIVX disc could be converted to unlimited watching if you paid for it.
Plus it's not like CD's/DVD's are incredibly resource-intensive. Remember AOL CD's you got sent for free? A quick Google says one billion of those were sent out. There's about as much plastic by weight in an average Chinese takeout, or a single plastic clamshell of fresh greens at the grocery store.
Awesome for the environment? Of course not. But "disgustingly greedy"? Nope, just a tiny drop in the bucket of plastics usage.
> Neither the red tapes nor DIVX destroyed themselves. Red tapes were rewound by a store, and any DIVX disc could be converted to unlimited watching if you paid for it.
I loved the story of DIVX. As a format, it never actually got hacked to unlock unlimited viewing of the far-cheaper-than-DVD discs.
It never got hacked not because its security was great (after all - a static disk which received unlock codes over dialup, had to have some significant attack surface), but because it sucked and wasn't worth hacking.
Video quality was lower than that of DVD's and soon enough after release, the pricing of used DVD's was close enough that buying DIVX made no sense at all. To say nothing of paying a premium price for all of that in the players.
Having now read about Red tapes, it seems like pure folly that DIVX should have been attempted.
Root of the comment thread was about Flexplay which literally did destroy itself. It shipped in a vacuum sealed bag with an oxygen reactive dye that rendered the disc useless about 48 hours after opening the package.
It didnt make it out of the test marketing stage, thankfully.
Morally - I don't see much difference, and think the push towards "rent everything, own nothing" is a bad, bad idea for social cohesion, economic equality, and general health and happiness.
Realistically - there is a considerable difference in the resources required to create a digital copy of a good vs a physical copy. The digital good has the slight upside that when companies abuse consumers through predatory pricing practices (literal rent-seeking...), they are destroying slightly less of the environment in the process.
I always find it funny when people try to use "rent-seeking" as a pejorative.
Like, yes, someone invested a lot of capital up front and hopes to make a profit by selling time-limited access to what they bought, thereby making the goods accessible to people who don't have the up-front capital.
I can see preferring to own, but as a moral position, "rent-seeking" is synonymous with "risk-taking" and "access-providing."
For my part I am very happy to be able to rent a digital movie for $4 rather than buying a DVD for $20. The risk to me is lower and I'm more likely to try movies I wouldn't take a $20 chance on.
"Rent-seeking" is when there isn't risk. If you set up a new investment in a competitive market, and sell access, that's not rent-seeking.
In this scenario, the predatory pricing is a key aspect of how it becomes rent seeking, and a well-functioning market would not have predatory pricing. And the root issue is tied in to how current US copyright law has major flaws.
Wasn't rent seeking meant to be referring to a party which wedges itself between a buyer and seller and skims a fee off the transaction despite not really adding much value but in some way has made themselves difficult to bypass.
Someone making content and renting it out wouldn't count, while say the App Store fee would.
As a developer, I made a couple of hundred thousand dollars from the Apple App Store. You know how much value the App Store provided me? Way, way more than the 30% I paid (this was years ago).
Without a portal that could direct millions of people to find my app, I probably would have made tens of dollars.
So we can debate fair pricing, but the idea that aggregators don’t provide any value isn’t an indictment of aggregators, it’s a confession of not understanding the business.
> Without a portal that could direct millions of people to find my app, I probably would have made tens of dollars.
Good point. Another often unappreciated point is that it's way easier to convince people to give their credit card to Apple than it is to convince them to give it to some random web site. Especially if they've already given their credit card to Apple, as many of them have.
The real issue with DIVX wasn't the rental/PPV model, it was certain studios who were boycotting DVD, due to poor DRM security. (Which they eventually 'patched' legally.) So it was imperative that DIVX failed to avoid a format war.
It’s not unreasonable. The problem is that blank media imposes a lower bound on the discount that can be offered for these rental schemes (to say nothing of the e-waste) to make economic sense to the seller.
Most consumers aren’t going to rent a movie they can only watch a few for a 10% discount off the price of unlimited views.
For example, Apple typically prices movie “purchases” around 4x of a 24 hr rental (75% off), and that has essentially zero marginal cost of production. With physical media there would be no profit.
I'm not sure how true that is as a general statement. Definitely yes for digital content that used to be shipped on physical media: music, movies, software, books to some degree. Uber and Zipcar (and competitors)--along with incremental public transit and cycling infrastructure along with e-bikes--have probably made it marginally easier to get off without owning a car in some locations.
But other than that I can't think of a lot of examples.
The number of homeowners in the US has plateaued after the Great Recession while the number of people who rent housing has been increasing since then. Yes, your clothes and kitchen appliances are safe for now, but who knows for how long?: https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s...
It might not be the worst idea to make renting houses normal and just as convenient as owning. If rental laws were fixed to provide extreme stability and decent rights, you'd only own for investment purposes. And you wouldn't have extreme upwards pressure from renters trying to buy at any cost to avoid shitty renting conditions.
We really should allow renters to stay indefinitely at rentals and also pass on the general maintenance responsibilities on to them as well.
Renting things like appliances doesn't make sense since you require exclusive access to them and generally use them for their entire lifespan. While houses mostly exist before and after your need for them.
> I recall reading a news article from a few years ago that said that the Japanese citizenship test is almost impossible to the point that few people try.
I did a quick search and as far as I can tell there is no Japanese citizenship test. There is a test of Japanese language skills but even that is not described as a high bar. Maybe this has also changed?
> the Soviets that viewed “The Road to Wrath”, as it was titled in the U.S.S.R, were in complete awe that even the poorest of the poor in the United States were able to save their money and afford an automobile. As the wrong message continued to spread, Stalin decided to pull the film from theaters after a few short weeks
Pulling a movie from theaters at that time was pretty equivalent to banning it. I don't see what doesn't match.
> Governments issue bonds for what turn out to be bad investments all the time.
Yeah, and this is even worse since Gangwon-do is an extremely rural and aging area without any hope of future growth. It only contributes 2% of the total GDP in South Korea and is rapidly shrinking. No sane private entity would go there without government supports since none of significant development there would make financial feasibility. It's where a government is supposed to intervene.
The current governor (who was a prosecutor like Yoon anyway) seems to consider this as a really good chance to put their political opponents into jail and they need to access confidential information to make the case. The default is a necessary part for the grand scheme and he probably was willing to make that sacrifice. He was just not competent enough to understand its implication.
