The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban • Hacker News Board

Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban

#201

Post by seibelj » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 5:25 PM UTC

abakker wrote: post #195

DickingAround wrote: post #53

This 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 ha…

It has never been proven that deflation is bad - Keynesians claim this is the worst thing in the world, but I still have never had it explained to me coherently way deflation is inherently a bad thing.

Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban

#202

Post by Hydraulix989 » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 5:26 PM UTC

Kranar wrote: post #162

aarongray wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Home prices in my area are up around 15% over the past year.

That makes real estate investments a good defense against inflation. A good defense against inflation are assets whose price increases at a rate higher than the rate of inflation. A bad defense would be an asset whose price increases at a rate lower than that of inflation.

Do you really believe real estate should be an investment, rather than a place to live?

Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban

#203

Post by wk_end » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 5:26 PM UTC

DickingAround wrote: post #53

This 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’m not sure if there’s a good way to measure how much CO2 is used to enforce fiat, but I very strongly suspect that it’s nowhere near as much as Bitcoin requires per economic unit or whatever. Bitcoin’s already using several country’s worth of CO2 and it’s still (compared to fiat) very fringe.

Also bear in mind that much of that CO2 generated by the force you’re describing, aside from the people guarding the banks directly, is amortized across all the other things that force guards. Even if fiat were replaced by Bitcoin overnight almost all of it would still need to be around.

Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban

#204

Post by tome » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 5:26 PM UTC

rybosworld wrote: post #182

tome wrote: post #164

Earlier 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.

Can you point me to some more thorough analysis of your claim? I've heard such things before but I've never seen it modelled and worked through. Until I see such an analysis I can't help thinking the argument is "we've thought about it a bit and it seems like it will be OK".

Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban

#205

Post by pmurt7 » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 5:27 PM UTC

pmurt7 wrote: post #92

_nckn wrote: post #46

Earlier 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?

Do you really think The Islamic State use BTC to buy weapons on the Dark Web?

Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban

#206

Post by bayesian_horse » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 5:27 PM UTC

There are some good reasons for banning cryptocurrencies. "Speculative nature" certainly isn't a good reason.

Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban

#207

Post by djschnei » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 5:27 PM UTC

bitcoinmonger wrote: post #179

I have a solution to the energy consumption problem. Instead of banning Bitcoin completely, just make it illegal for individuals to run cryptocurrency nodes or perform mining operations. In it's place, each government can then run their own cluster of nodes for the general public to use as a cryptocurrency. This way, the general population has access to cryptocurrency, but government can monitor and control all of th…

> but government can monitor and control all of the transactions that take place to ensure that no illegal activity arises.

I don't mean any disrespect when I say this, but when I read comments like, after the initial shock subsides, there is always a realization that we all have such widely varying and disconnected worldviews that I simply don't understand how mass governance could every work without eventually succumbing to violent conflict... Not trying to make any comment on the underlying merit of either worldview, just that it's like we live in completely different realities... It's very depressing, to be completely honest.

Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban

#208

Post by carlosrg » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 5:27 PM UTC

Is it just me or some people are starting to lose their mind over Bitcoin and crypto? The visceral hate it is getting seems out of place, and the arguments are getting more desperate (now we should ban crypto?)

Don't know if that's the case with the author, but from what I've been seeing in social networks and such, it looks like some people have decided crypto is an alt-right thing (not true) and we should "cancel" it. Ironic, because there's nothing more conservative that banning crypto and sticking to fiat.

Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban

#209

Post by majormajor » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 5:28 PM UTC

DickingAround wrote: post #53

This 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…

The "backed by guns" argument ignores the more powerful backing force of a society's belief and actions. Things don't daily come to the point of us being forced to believe our currency is valuable with guns and nukes, we just created this system because it's one we wanted to live in, and having such a fiat currency makes a lot of things easier. Bitcoin, on the other hand, is using its energy constantly.

Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban

#210

Post by samvher » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 5:29 PM UTC

christiansakai wrote: post #30

jtolds wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came here to say this exact same thing. There is seriously interesting and useful real work being done under the umbrella term "decentralized finance" or DeFi. It is hard to cut through the noise of get rich quick schemes, but at the core, the DeFi stuff, built on top of green cryptocurrency (proof of stake), along with quickly improving zero-knowledge proof tech, is actually useful and groundbreaking. Bitcoin and…

Indeed, the world of cyptocurrency/blockchain research has many ground breaking papers and news are often real time, even crypto news aggregator can't keep up with it. HN crowd refuses to care about it because of bad taste of crypto in general.

Do you have recommendations on where to find this stuff?

I agree that there seems to be a lot of interesting work going on and the ideas of decentralized finance have a lot of potential. At the moment it really is hard to cut through the noise though and from what I can find just searching for an afternoon it looks like a minefield. I'm hoping that the bad stuff will all fade away and something useful will remain.