Here's a revolutionary idea, if you don't like a particular asset don't buy it. if you think its a terrible idea etc. don't use your money to own it. How other people choose to utilize their assets is their own business.
The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban
191–200 of 630 posts
Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
> [Bitcoin is] the only thing on that list of inflation hedges that has a fixed supply. Aha! That brings me to my next question. In what sense does bitcoin actually have a fixed supply? Sure, a loose coalition of people agree for it to have a fixed supply at the moment, but if enough of the miners, core developers, etc. agree they can change the rules arbitrarily, viz. hard forks. Why should we believe that bitcoin r…
That's mostly a matter of economic incentives. It's technically possible but it's similar to the idea of a rich person lighting a pile of money on fire. If a proposal to raise the cap is introduced, price would react negatively, hurting miners, and making it more (relatively) expensive to mine. It's unlikely there is any scenario where it is economically feasible to try to raise the supply cap.
A [relative] lack of block rewards to earn hurts miners too...
Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban
#193Its not clear to me why it is fundamentally more acceptable for Wall street to speculate on "crazier things every day before lunch". The money hedge funds are making isn't coming out of nowhere, its not like the games they play are net positive. Their big pay outs are still coming out of the pockets of regular people. It seems like the difference with Bitcoin is that an individual gets to choose whether they want to participate or not.
Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban
#194What a terrible article. Crypto is a new technology that will likely have many uses, to advocate banning it nationally is dangerous and would quickly put us behind the rest of the world. There are easier ways around the "energy use dilemma": carbon tax. If your energy used for mining comes from renewable resources, then there is no issue.
Unless you are running completely detached from the public grid, consuming renewable energy for crypto mining absolutely indirectly produces CO2. You are buying renewable energy that could otherwise be sold to another customer/jurisdiction where it would displace fossil fuel usage.
This isn't an academic exercise, this is an issue that renewables operators are dealing with right now. Hydro-Quebec is the state-owned corporation which handles all generation, transmission, and distribution in the province of Quebec. As the name implies, the vast majority of Quebec's generating capacity comes from large hydroelectric facilities located in the north. The company sells hydropower to the northeastern United States during times of day when demand is high. This is a mutually beneficial arrangement: the profits from the sale of hydropower in peak periods allows Hydro-Quebec to subsidize its own ratepayers who enjoy the lowest electricity rates in North America, and the Northeast US in turn doesn't have to build as many peaking power plants which are typically gas-fired facilities that produce CO2.
However, the low cost of electricity in Quebec has made it extremely popular with crypto miners, to the point where Hydro-Quebec has been forced to place miners into a 300 MW allocation block [1]. Miners who didn't manage to get into the allocation block are charged a rate that is more than double the normal rate in order to try and disincentivize their activities.
If the crypto miners weren't in Quebec, this excess energy would be sold to the northeastern US where it would displace the capacity of some CO2-generating peaker plants. But because it's being diverted to crypto mining, the energy doesn't get used for that.
Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban
#195This article seems to intentionally ignore the core reason for cryptocurrencies; escaping inflation and control. The article then proposes to use the law to bring those people back within the control of fiat and government oversight. I no longer think the environmental argument is really plausible here. Clearly crypto mining is emitting using a lot of power and some of that is CO2. But the competition is fiat; backed…
I never understand the counter-inflation argument...most economists understand inflation is something to be managed, but it is far from proven that target inflation is bad. There are many useful economic properties of inflation.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin has undergone such massive speculative appreciation that everything around it has deflated in comparison. As a result, bitcoin is spectacularly less useful than it would have been. It is no longer useful as a method of transaction and really only a ledger and store of value.
this inflation argument is specious. It just isn't the problem that demanded an unregulated anonymous deflationary currency.
Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban
#196The hullabaloo over Bitcoin’s environmental cost is a classic example of people focusing on things that are easily visible and being totally oblivious to ones that are unseen or not obvious. What is the energy cost of the current currency system and the political structure that keeps it in use? I’m going to guess that it is significantly higher than Bitcoin. That’s not even mentioning Proof of Stake, which will essen…
> and the political structure that keeps it in use? 1. False equivalence, since the environmental concern is about the generation of cryptocurrency not its social implications vs a crypto-currency-free world. 2. You've expanded this question so much that it is not possible to answer. The political structure that keeps money is use is basically the political structure of almost all world states, and capitalist/money-b…
> > and the political structure that keeps it in use?
> 1. False equivalence
It's additionally a false equivalence because those political structures also keep in place the things you want to buy with bitcoin, such as shops, factories, and things you produce bitcoin with, such as power stations and computers.
Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban
#197Most of the article's arguments work if you replace the word "Gold" for the word cryptocurrency. Gold itself is just a yellow metal, it is valuable largely for the human belief that it has value, though admittedly it is somewhat pretty, a good conductor of electrons, and has historical value due to its ease of work and use in numerous ancient artifacts. Still, as a currency or value holder, gold is simply a metal tha…
I think gold makes more sense if you think of wealth as useful largely as a status indicator in the conspicuous consumption sens or peacocking. A gold necklace displays wealth and presumably status in the same way designer clothes or a luxury car does. Beaver pelts or cars wear down over time though unlike gold, and the amount of crypto one holds is hard to display ostentatiously, at least for now. BAT, Steemit or cr…
There is a lot more "paper" gold than physical gold in jewelry or gold bars. The overwhelming of gold and gold derivatives are not using it to signal their status.
Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban
#198I find it funny that we only talk about blanket bans and increased regulation when the poor start accumulating wealth. We saw this when GME was going through the roof and Lee Cooperman went live on CNN to bash retail investors. Similarly, when bitcoin starts trending up we have Ray Dalio talking about future crypto ban. Hedge funds really don't like this I take it. But I digress, a crypto ban would be disruptive to a very innovative tech (crypto speculation aside) in finance. However, regulation and taxation is likely a better approach not only for world governments, but also for taking projects like Bitcoin to a more sustainable and environmentally-friendly realm of operation.
Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But banning cryptocurrency would be much easier since the majority of the population doesn't own any and it can be framed in very positive terms. Sounds unrealistic. Remember the war on drugs?
In my personal experience most people think of cryptocurrencies as a Ponzi scheme, some kind of money laundering operation, a tremendous waste of energy, or some combination of those three. In light of that, I think a cryptocurrency ban would be easy for politicians to sell to the public using those terms. How effective the ban would be is another question, but I am mainly talking about how I think the politicians wo…
Oh, I didn't realize you only meant how easy it would be to pass the ban. Of course it would be easy to pass a federal ban in the United States, where it's easy to pass many things even when they're extremely unpopular. Marijuana is still banned federally despite well over two thirds of the country opposing the ban!
Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
AFAIK, crypto is very popular with right-wing.
Do you think terrorist organisations use BTC ? Of course no, they are fine with USD. Should we ban USD too?
I always assumed they would use BTC for some of their transactions! Why wouldn't they? You said "Of course no, they are fine with USD" so do you have any evidence that they don't?