What terrorism? Since 9/11, there have been only two major Islamic terrorism incidents on US soil. The Boston Marathon bombing was by two brothers, and the San Bernardino shooting was a husband and wife team. Both were low-budget operations. Even 9/11 is estimated to have cost the attackers only about $400K. What costs is setting up an full-sized army, like ISIS.
People from the US and other countries are sending money abroad via crypto to fund terrorism outside the US
People from the US are sending crypto abroad to feed their families.
The cash argument is not a good take at all. When you travel with large amounts of cash people ask questions, you are obligated to declare it when crossing borders if it’s over certain amount(over 0,25BTC as USD will make you fill out declarations and it may be confiscated until you can prove that it is legitimately yours) depositing it to your bank account rings all kind of bells, the banks can refuse to work with y…
> cash is no good anymore. Crime is gone now? What else are they going to use? Crypto is used by less than 1% of the world. All crime uses "cash" relatively speaking. *a lot of it is "digital" cash but still.
The USG could kill it by using a 51 percent attack; the NSA must have rows upon rows of servers that could be repurposed for a week or two to destroy the market. Split the blockchain every couple of hours into several different versions, eventually there would be little chance to reconcile things.
The NSA/CIA/etc. is precisely why this won't happen, for the same reason the same are launching no wide-scale attacks to take down Tor - the guys in suits doing questionable government things need anonymity too.
> They dont want competition Which is another way of saying they want absolute control, which in this case is the absurd charade where "inflation" measures that they claim represent life on the ground exclude the essentials like education, healthcare, and housing.
I liked the take from the Mayor of Miami (from a podcast about cryptocurrency): "they [governments] will have to borrow money like everybody else borrows money, they can't just print their own money. They have to borrow money at an interest rate. And if governments don't behave fiscally then they are going to have to borrow at worse and worse rates. They can't just invent their own interest rates and currency, which…
There is a (seemingly growing) number of people that openly say that the budget doesn't matter. You just print and spend.
Fortunately this incentivizes finding ways to circumvent that regime and point out how absurd it is.
> U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and other officials have warned about the use of cryptocurrencies for illicit transactions. Wait until you hear about cash. More seriously (and hopefully less reductionist) i feel nations who embrace cryptocurrencies early will see mixed results as the landscape matures. I am more confident that nations which turn their back on it, or shut it out completely, will see a loss of o…
> Whatever your stance on cryptocurrencies are, what is of little dispute is the business opportunities they have created. Binance and Coinbase are large, successful companies. Poloniex was sold for ~400M. This is the broken window fallacy writ large. The small value cryptocurrencies provide over other digital transaction methods is overshadowed by the huge inefficiencies of how transactions are processed via PoW. Th…
PoS is replacing PoW at scale. It's time for new arguments.
Nigeria banned banks from trading in crypto, killing off the fiat. Nigerians just started making telegram and whatsapp groups, made codenames for different coins and traded them for cash or bank transfers. Unless you decide to bank commerce and phones and the internet and talking to your neighbor and running a computer, you can't ban crypto.
What you're describing is laundering, so now you're committing two crimes. I wouldn't bet against the government taking an interest once values being exchanged are large enough.
Backed by the issuing companies' heartful statements of best intent.
There are stable coins backed by crypto.
What does that mean? How does "crypto" guarantee that someone has the reserves necessary to back the stable coin in circulation? Whenever cryptocurrency interacts with the "real" world, you're trusting someone to verify that the real world state corresponds to the state recorded in the blockchain. I have yet to see a satisfactory solution for this. You're also trusting someone to verify that all this software is free from backdoors and bugs that could be used to commit fraud.
Crackdown on current state of crypto can only help it in the long run, if you actually really believe it. Right now it’s market mostly dedicated to get rich quick schemes. While it works great if you’re on top of the pyramid, it’s only hurting crypto case for the future.
DeFi has a legitimate use case and NFTs have an astonishing number of use cases. Smart Contracts are an incredible, incredible innovation. We are at the tip of the iceberg and nothing has been more disappointing than seeing the traditional tech world's dismissal of crypto as "get rich schemes". The tech world is surprisingly as complacent now as the legacy dinosaurs it first helped destroy in the 1990s and 2000s.
DeFi main value proposition isn’t tech (that’s cool) but avoiding regulations.
Blockchain has lots of potentially interesting use cases like NFT, but crypto currency is still not one of them. And by not cracking down on scams in cryptocurrency will only make any future adoption harder.
You (government currency regulators) make it illegal to convert fiat to crypto, and then monitor crypto ledgers for that last bit of folks who still attempt to use crypto. When exchanges break the law, you ship the folks who own the exchange to jail [1]. Crypto folks think they're the former cartoon panel, when it's really the latter how nation state enforcement works [2]. Governments crack down on money laundering w…
All this will do is compel companies to move to crypto friendly countries. China squeezed down on crypto. Chinese exchanges just moved their headquarters to Malta. When you start getting into DAOs and their legal status and everything starts becoming murky. Crypto has truly some of the most exciting developments taking place in the world today at the intersection of art, finance, law and economics. The quality of dis…
> The quality of discussion on HN about crypto is woefully out of touch.
Given most of the comments I read, I'd say HN is aging out - like facebook median age > snapchat > tiktok
Now I wonder what the replacement is - it must already exist! We just don't know about it yet.
> U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and other officials have warned about the use of cryptocurrencies for illicit transactions. Wait until you hear about cash. More seriously (and hopefully less reductionist) i feel nations who embrace cryptocurrencies early will see mixed results as the landscape matures. I am more confident that nations which turn their back on it, or shut it out completely, will see a loss of o…
I don't ever see most nations willingly giving up monetary policy by ceding to cryptocurrencies. This is especially true for China and the US. They can however adopt their own version, where they remain the authority and would operate the nodes responsible for handling transactions. This would allow many of the advantages of cryptocurrencies while still allowing a country to control not only the money supply but also be able to audit money and (even in the cases of fraud and theft) return money to its rightful owners. You could even have a system where you can freely convert between the digital version and the physical cash version.