Live data from Hacker News

The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban

stephendiehl.com

621–630 of 630 posts

Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban

#621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to have a lot of respect for him, he's very intelligent and a great hacker. But man he's really gone down the rabbit hole basically on the edge of consipiracy theorist lately. It's sad. His viewpoints are naive and he never proposes viable solutions. It's easy to say ban "X" when that is never going to happen. If he was really interested in a solution he would acknowledge the benefits that people are getting o…

>> He is CTO at Adjoint - "digitises cash and settlement processes for multinational corporates." How can anyone respect such person? His job is as unethical as it gets. He is a monster and a woke hypocrite.

Article should have come with a disclaimer since it seems he has a bit of a conflict of interest.

Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban

#622
post #55

Seems to me that Stephen is not well informed on crypto in general. This article is really only relevant to Bitcoin. Take a project like Brave for instance which is disrupting the online advertising model: https://brave.com/ (I am completely unaffiliated, just a fan of the project) Can you look at this project and tell me with a straight face it is bad for the environment and should be banned by government? Because t…

The thing is, Im not sure Brave really needs a cryptocurrency. It seems that a centralized DB would be enough.

How can you ENSURE decentralization on a centralized database? How can you ENSURE anonymity and they aren't selling you data? How can you ENSURE borderless transaction in fiat? There's alot of things a blockchain does that can't be done otherwise.

Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban

#623
post #239

I think this article is a very nice example of why the US is superior (or at least I think is superior) to China. The political system that allows someone (or some entity) uninhibited power over its citizens, institutions, companies and rights; or the political system where power is fragmented and people need to converge toward a solution (through potential infighting in a big building), need to convince other people…

>t's not even clear why this author should have any authority? He doesn't have any projects, ran any companies (or any mentions of that) or did any significant academic work.

Search alittle deeper and you see why he hates crypto so much.

He's CTO of Adjoint:

"Adjoint Treasury is a real-time payments and settlement platform for corporate treasury"

A.K.A, Crypto is stealing his thunder.

Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban

#624
post #219

I think cryptocurrencies are idiotic, but this essay just does not make a case for a blanket ban at all, nor do I think one is necessary. The environmental impact should be regulated, but other than that, governments should just stay out of it and let the cryptocurrency landscape be the wild frontier its proponents want it to be. May the best obfuscated smart contract code win, until no one wants to play anymore.

Other than the miners paying the market price for electricity, how would the environmental impact be regulated?

tax exchanges both ways, with a bit more than normal capital gains. Want to buy bitcoin, tax is like an IRA. Want to sell bitcoin for fiat, tax it like cap gains. Use some of this tax as an 'externality tax' like carbon tax should be anyways.

Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban

#625

This is America, banning things rarely works as intended. A carbon tax solves this problem just fine.

> This is America Note that the author of the post is based in London, UK: https://www.stephendiehl.com/

Everything about this article oozzes mal intent. From the UK, claiming 'us in the US'. he's also CTO of Adjoint Treasury, which does real-time payments and settlement platform for corporate treasury's.

Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban

#626
post #59

To anyone who thinks a ban would never happen, look into how the US govt banned gold ownership after the great depression.

Gold is hard to store and hide. I can't hide a billion dollars worth of gold. But i can hide a billion dollars of crypto on a single piece of paper. The government will never be able to take that from me.

Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban

#627

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 succ…

The saving grace to human society's have been the ability to rebel against a despotic government. Recently, within the last generation or two, we've lost that ability. Government is an amorphous entity that will always attempt to gain more power and more control. Separating the government from financial and economic power might be a hurdle that a technologically advanced society must overcome in order to prosper and not devolve into some 1984 distopia. Crypto might be our saving grace as opposed to our evil overlord that the article claims it to be.

Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban

#628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Exactly what who did?

US and allies got rid of nuclear power for Iran.

Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban

#629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but that doesn’t take away from the other guy, not everything is for everyone, that’s ok.

It literally takes away from the other guy. Poor sap #1 earned money so far, poor sap #2 lost money so far. At any given point there are more poor saps of type #2 than of type #1.

That’s not how that works, “sap #2” was a willing and active participant, nothing was taken away.

Re: The political case for a blanket cryptocurrency ban

#630
post #411
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What math prevents a big enough group of miners and users rolling back the blockchain?

The sheer cost of spooling up enough hardware and paying for the electricity to run it. That's literally the entire point of proof of work.

Then hard forks would never happen, right?
Post reply on HN