Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dutch official calls for complete ban on Bitcoin

cointelegraph.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 221 posts

Re: Dutch official calls for complete ban on Bitcoin

#141

Post by Growling_owl »

emn13 wrote: post #120
Growling_owl wrote: post #97

Nobody, not even Biden has the political goodwill to make Bitcoin illegal and enrage so many constituents (aka lost votes) The only ones who maybe can do it are Xi and Putin, and the latter seems more pro than against because everything which goes against the dollar is Putin's friend. Xi is also on and off again with Bitcoin but every day which goes by in which he is not decisive is a day in favor of Bitcoin. You are…

Even if the people you label modern day robinhoods (but that take money away from people who work and make sacrifices to get ahead in life and redistribute it to themselves, which is not quite the typical robinhood version) really are as self-serving as you suggest - do you really think that making bitcoint would enrage so many constituents? How many people do you think actually hold bitcoin? https://www.buybitcoinwo…

1) Elections in America are always close, every race, every candidate is not safe. That's the nature of the 2 party system, hence every vote counts

2) You are getting your data from the wrong source, Coinbase alone has 56 million verified users. And unlike FB those are real , not bot, as every user have to be KYC'eed for AML purposes. That's just one exchange.

3) Also with regards to those millions of users, the situation is peculiar because it's for sure one person per family (the millennial or the college kid). So you enrage one person, but that person then would badmouth you with all the people in their close family who were otherwise neutral to the BTC ban, but now that you hurt their son finances, they just aren't anymore.

Re: Dutch official calls for complete ban on Bitcoin

#142

Post by tehsauce »

adwi wrote: post #113

Re the carbon footprint argument with Bitcoin: I’m curious how the energy use of just a top 5 retail bank compares to Bitcoin. Chase [0], for instance, has over 5,000 retail locations and 16,000 ATMs. And the servers, and call centers/corporate offices to support 200,000 employees. And the cars they drive back and forth to those offices, and the construction of new ones, and flights (some private), etc etc. How much…

It’s not even close. Banks provide so many services. your bank could be using a cryptocurrency as their backend, and you wouldn’t even know. the technology has almost zero impact to the user experience or efficiency. sorry

Re: Dutch official calls for complete ban on Bitcoin

#143

Post by Taek »

Shadonototro wrote: post #48

bitcoins show the nasty nature of the people all about profits, nobody care about solving problems, they just want the price to grow to make profit from their investment

The people who care about actual problem solving are still around, and at the core development layer Bitcoin is absolutely dominated by people who care about making a healthy technology over making a profit on their investment.

Re: Dutch official calls for complete ban on Bitcoin

#145

Post by ben_w »

ur-whale wrote: post #55
anonuser123456 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can pay the tax man in USD to stay out of jail. Sounds pretty valuable to me.

Same line of reasoning used by every racketeer's victim trying to convince themselves paying up is the reasonable thing to do.

I believe that’s why, in America, non-landowners, women, non-Christians, former slaves, and non-white people in general, all fought for the right to vote on how that power could and could not be used.

Re: Dutch official calls for complete ban on Bitcoin

#146

Post by emn13 »

Growling_owl wrote: post #141
emn13 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if the people you label modern day robinhoods (but that take money away from people who work and make sacrifices to get ahead in life and redistribute it to themselves, which is not quite the typical robinhood version) really are as self-serving as you suggest - do you really think that making bitcoint would enrage so many constituents? How many people do you think actually hold bitcoin? https://www.buybitcoinwo…

1) Elections in America are always close, every race, every candidate is not safe. That's the nature of the 2 party system, hence every vote counts 2) You are getting your data from the wrong source, Coinbase alone has 56 million verified users. And unlike FB those are real , not bot, as every user have to be KYC'eed for AML purposes. That's just one exchange. 3) Also with regards to those millions of users, the situ…

Elections are only close in some states, and its hard to predict which issues voters will care about, especially since nobody has proposed exactly what a "bitcoin ban" would look like. The linked article also mentioned that coinbase number, but it's a little hard to interpret: not everybody having an account will be in the US, nor will they necessarily own any bitcoin, nor, if they own bitcoin, will it necessarily be more than a tiny amount; it might just be a bit of a game - i.e. hard to say what people's opinion on the matter is just by having a coinbase account.

Re: Dutch official calls for complete ban on Bitcoin

#147

Post by ganzuul »

Tade0 wrote: post #65

Putting aside for a moment whether this will actually happen, I would like to ask: how? How do you effectively ban circulation of certain types of information? The entertainment industry didn't manage to achieve this over the last 20 years.

> How do you effectively ban circulation of certain types of information?

This is an important question for our right to privacy too. Lets say that we succeed in replacing law with code, which we are doing but not very successfully. We can not rely on hardware like DRM does. We need to integrate a censor into the network.

Something that might work is a system like Ethereum's distributed virtual machine, and a much more involved version of smart contracts. Then you could fingerprint your private data, upload your fingerprint to each smart contract platform, and financial penalties are applied to those who transfer your data on the network without your permission.

I think we can replace most of government functions and services with a selection of apps that you subscribe to / tax you. I recently started working in earnest on the idea after being inspired by Project Cybersyn's planned economy.

You can make the cybernetic system democratic by treating likes/dislikes as votes; data to feed a recommender algorithm with. If the algo is expensive like NNMF you can use that as proof of work with real value. With enough data, the algo becomes a personal agent which can predict how the digital citizen will vote, and possibly able to do work with real value. It could perhaps negotiate a smart contract for you without interactivity.

Re: Dutch official calls for complete ban on Bitcoin

#149

Post by MereInterest »

keymone wrote: post #138
MereInterest wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The energy use is for processing transactions. The block reward exists to give an incentive to process transactions.

Categorically false. Exactly zero energy is required to produce a block. If your statement were true and bitcoin required Switzerland’s worth of energy to produce a block - how on earth did satoshi mine all the early blocks by himself? Your understanding of how it all works is simply flawed. Energy is required to satisfy difficulty requirement, which has to do with chain security, not with transaction processing.

Got it, so you're separating out the energy requirements into two buckets, then pretending that those two are unrelated. I agree that in general, processing transactions is not an energy-intensive task. This is why traditional payment processors with trusted nodes are able to do so efficiently. In the case of cryptocurrency, where the assumption is that all nodes are inherently untrustworthy, the resource requirement is stapled onto the transaction processing.

When people say "transactions cost X amount to process", they mean "in the current state of bitcoin", not in the past when there were very few transaction validators. The more transaction validators (typically called "miners") there are, the higher the cost of validating a transaction, due to Bitcoin's difficulty scaling.

I'm not sure why you separate out chain security from transaction validation and treat them as separate, when the chain security is there to protect against invalid transactions. It's sort of the entire point of it.

Re: Dutch official calls for complete ban on Bitcoin

#150

Post by ben_w »

chaganated wrote: post #5
Encybe wrote: post #3

> has no intrinsic value and is only valuable because others may accept it. So does USD

to be fair, we print it on some pretty nice paper

Sorry to burst your bubble (unless that was a joke in which case carry on), but as a foreigner, American currency is one of the most boring I’ve seen.

More seriously: the USA really needs to retire the $1 notes from circulation a decade or more ago.

Post reply on HN