You know who already made tens of millions in profits and will continue to because of stories like this? Market makers that redeem billions of USDT for cash with Tether/Bitfinex every time it goes under $0.99. Borrow USDT on leverage, cash out at $1 to US bank, mint USDC with Circle, swap to USDT, repay USDT loan and bank the difference, rinse and repeat until it's back to $1.
I think that's likelihood is connected to the government resolve to rein in crypto shadiness, which given recent events seems like it's only starting to pick up.
nobody is redeeming tethers with bitfinex, they don't even have proper banking anywhere and their accounts are constantly shutdown by various entities.
Many of my Ukraininan/Russian friends would not be alive today if it wasn't for crypto, same goes for many journalists and innocent civilians that escaped controlling governments, war zones, hyperinflation etc. Show me another asset that you can take with you in times of crisis on a usb stick or piece of paper, and transact without middle-men globally. A significant number of people live in places where saying/doing something controversial can get your assets frozen (Canada '22) or much worse.
Sure BTC uses a lot of electricity, but so does the US military which is key to maintaining the $ as global reserve currency. There are many people and projects in crypto trying to do the right thing about energy (https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/).
Dunno why you would fight against a fair, open, censorship-resistant, global financial system, unless you're a dictator. You won't need it, until you do.
> Dunno why you would fight against a fair, open, censorship-resistant, global financial system
If that's all it was then you would be correct, only nasty folks would be against it. But that's not all it is, or even the main thing it is. The same qualities that make it useful for your friends during a war also make it useful for various sorts of crime, but all the time not just under (what should be) highly unusual and dangerous circumstances.
The fight here is all of us against the dictators and warmongers. If we work to create a "fair, open, censorship-resistant, global financial system" together we can do that without enabling scammers and crooks.
> How do you create an “open and censorship resistant system” that blocks only a specific category of people?
The current rise of ubiquitous surveillance is already creating a censorship-resistant system. Whether it's open or not is a matter of policy, rather than technology.
> First we start with scammers and crooks, then fast forward a little, and suddenly now we are doing civil forfeitures?
That's a really good point: I would hope if there were more footage of civil forfeiture it would be harder to get away with it, eh? If everybody can see what everybody else-- including police and politicians --is up to then we can only get away with what everybody (or most everybody) accepts. I call it the "Tyranny of Mrs. Grundy".
The same way you would use redis to cache your expensive dbms queries, you can use this as the 'redis' for S3 blobs.
We use it at my firm to cache frequently accessed ML models and training data. Getting these directly from S3 can take a few seconds per blob, and with the cache it takes that down to milliseconds.
