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The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban

stephendiehl.com

611–620 of 630 posts

Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban

#611
> There is not a single profitable company that came out of the excess of $20 billion poured in. Startups have a high failure rate, but a 100% failure rate is unheard of.

The article supports that with a paywalled link to Financial Times. Here's the full-text archive: https://archive.is/yMsep

If you read it, you'll see that it says no such thing, and in fact mentions a number of major ICO projects that delivered. Their first example is Filecoin, whose purpose was to create an economy of peer-to-peer data storage. It's live now with over an exabyte of capacity.

Various smaller ICO projects not mentioned in the article have also delivered. Two I'm familiar with: Funfair, which does regulated gambling on Ethereum, and Monolith, which puts tokens on VISA cards for spending, without having to take custody of them.

Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban

#612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the issue with Iran using it? Or is it that Iran are just "bad guys" therefore if they use it must be bad. In that basis let's get rid of nuclear power because Iran use that. I think they also have the internet so while we are at it let's get rid of that.

> In that basis let's get rid of nuclear power because Iran use that. That’s exactly what they did.

Exactly what who did?

Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban

#613
post #582
post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright. I tried to do this. I'm certainly open to learning. But it looks like I'm actually going to need citations from you because everything I'm finding so far confirms that we do NOT know how much gold exists in the earth, or where it might be found, or whether it will become economically feasible to extract it. All we know is that discoveries are slowing down.[0][1][2][3] I've tried to read a variety of sources,…

This is ultimately a matter of perspective. If you're a cornucopian, and you're certain that new technology will unlock much more efficient smelting/separation/filtration/asteroid mining techniques, then sure, gold is virtually limitless. If you're a realist, you understand that ore quality degrades as a function of the fact that we smelt the highest purity ores first, and that while (usually very small) new vein dis…

I can see how this would affect one of the articles' points, that there may be gold it isn't ever going to be profitable to mine, but what about the other points that new veins are still being formed and we don't have any specific reason to believe we've found all the ones that would be profitable?

I'm definitely not meaning to argue with you. I ask that sincerely. I wasn't particularly interested in this subject before, but any time I have a chance to ask questions of someone 20 years ahead of me in anything, I try to make the most of it!

Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban

#614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think personally that proof of stake and proof of work both don’t matter in the end. I believe that all cryptocurrencies are at their heart scams. Proof of stake doesn’t change this dynamic. As I see it, cryptocurrencies doesn’t actually solve any real, significant problems we face as a (global) society. And to pick one important thing: they exclusively enable crypolocker randsomeware, and we know their devastating…

Tell the people of Venezuela that. Cryptocurrencies have the ability to free people from broken dictatorial economies. While you may enjoy the benefits of a first world currency, check your privilege for just one moment and realise the world is much bigger than you would believe.

Venezuela’s problems are due to US aggression and sanctions, not its fiat currency.

Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban

#615
post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Originally posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238410 >. Slightly edited. If you live in a country with a highly functional banking system and no kleptocracy, Bitcoin is probably a bit puzzling unless you have family in Cuba. But it’s not puzzling at all for those of us who live somewhere in the middle of the broad spectrum between Switzerland and Somalia, because most places have a little kleptocracy. A…

So Argentina has problems that crypto-"currencies" serve as a workaround for? But do they help actually solve them? If not, then they are harmful as workarounds reduce the incentive to actually fix problems.

Well, Argentina doesn't really care about these "problems"; it's a large expanse of dirt and rocks, and what people do on top of that dirt and those rocks only affects it minimally. They are born, live, suffer, and die, but Argentina endures.

Some of the people do have these problems, but they aren't the ones who have power.

Rich people in Argentina already have most of their money in offshore bank accounts, so these "problems" aren't problems for them†; they may even benefit from them; for example, because they can buy bigger houses and pay their servants less, and things like the rigged currency system give a lot of tools to the ruling party to reward their supporters with. When the official exchange rate is 30% below the real rate, for example, an import license is virtually a license to print money.

So, I think that providing workarounds to the people who need them, cryptocurrencies probably not only ameliorate the most immediate and pressing concerns of poor parts of the population like Venezuelan immigrants, but probably also adjust the power balance in a more liberal and democratic direction. This will improve the chance of those concerns being ameliorated by public policy over the next decades as well. But it's hard to tell what will really happen. The potential disaster scenario is that, by making most taxation impossible, cryptocurrencies destroy the modern welfare state without providing anything to replace it. So the public hospitals close, the enormous police force starts to support itself by extracting tribute, and the infrastructure decays. Pretty similar to what's happened in the US over the last 50 years, in fact, only more so.

However, at this point I think the modern welfare state is already doing a good enough job of destroying itself without any significant help from cryptocurrencies—as evidence, I can point to Maduro, Macri, Bolsonaro, Trump, and Brexit, and metonymically to the social changes they betoken. So at this point I'm more worried about cushioning the collapse than preventing it.

______

† That isn't the way I see it, because I've seen how rich people in more egalitarian societies have better lives than rich people in Argentina, but it's by and large how powerful people in Argentina see it, and that's what counts when we're trying to predict the political effects of events.

Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban

#616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're free to your opinion, but I see little benefit in a technology for your average constituent that is more expensive than instant payments to move funds, has a highly volatile value (which is an anti pattern of a currency), and provides little to no recourse in the event there is fraud or theft (again, an anti-pattern crypto proponents champion as some sort of feature). One person's authoritarianism is another's…

> I see little benefit in a technology I disagree that this should ever be a cause for banning something. It's not the government's job to pick and choose which technologies or products will be successful or useful.

[deleted]

Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban

#617
post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares what Satoshi wanted? He/she/they do not control the system.

Yes, actually. His/her/their wallet has the majority of bitcoins. If they were to move them, everything would crash.

Please stop spreading misinformation, Satoshi has 1M of a total 21M supply, if he/she/they are still alive and have access to their keys.

Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban

#619
post #32
post #5

I think the main premise of this article is the fact that crypto's carbon emission is insane, especially Bitcoin, which I agree (I don't hold Bitcoin for this exact reason). But there are many other crypto that uses Proof of Stake, way way greener than Proof of Work, such as Cardano. Even Ethereum is transitioning to Proof of Stake. This article should be re-titled "The Political Case for a Blanket Proof of Work Ban"…

The main premise of the article is that cryptocurrencies are "speculation for speculation’s sake," i.e. gambling, and that's bad. Also, the article claims that they contribute to inequality. The green stuff is basically a side note. I don't think it's a terribly strong case but I suppose it depends on whether you agree that crypto is gambling and if you think gambling should banned. Anyway, I think lots of people stu…

What about filecoin, which stores your data across multiple keys so not one person/ centralized entity has access to your files? Cheaper, more redundancy and more secure than AWS? What about Chainlink, which is a decentralized oracle network for a variety of different information? What about all the DeFi, DeID, banking the unbanked, cross-border transfers not hampered by some evil authority? Polkadot is nothing short of a technological breakthrough in computation exchange and an economic revolution in the way it's finance and parachain leases work that can be applied to many different fields.

Why do people look at bitcoin and claim all crypto are equal, throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban

#620
post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fiat currency allows the government to make its citizens pay for its usurious debts, by printing more money. This is not possible with gold or bitcoin.

I'm still not seeing an argument that fiat currency leads to war ...

Not that i agree with the sentiment entirely but i believe OP's and subsequent commenter are saying is that a nations control over currency and wealth distribution gives rise to despotism.
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