Live data from Hacker News

China declares cryptocurrency deals ‘illegal’

dailybusinessgroup.co.uk

401–410 of 699 posts

Re: China declares cryptocurrency deals ‘illegal’

#401

And the anti-cryptocurrency sentiment I've seen all over HN --- which appeared suddenly a few months ago --- is totally organic, right? I'm sick and tired of everything being a narrative manipulation op.

Other than occasionally promoting ethereum and connected scams that have been heavily invested in by SV VC firms HN has been pretty reliably negative on cryptocurrency.

Even pure tech work that just happens to have been done by Bitcoin related folks tends to get downvoted and flagged, e.g.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27573315

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18645790

Re: China declares cryptocurrency deals ‘illegal’

#402

Wow, imagine living in a country where the legal financial assets you own can be turned criminal where accessing them is punished with hard labor. Sounds like a dystopian nightmare.

But it's "for the environment." Idiots always buy into the propaganda that tell them that authoritarian crack downs are noble and good.

Re: China declares cryptocurrency deals ‘illegal’

#403

Excellent news for the climate.

The idea that crypto mining is bad for the climate is short-sighted. It is based on the wrong assumption of a static universe. But this world is not static. Let's say for example, all goverments would become more strict in taxing energy consumption. (Presumably to help save the climate.) Now at some point there is a market incentive to develop mining techniques that optimize for less energy consumption above all else…

> Now at some point there is a market incentive to develop mining techniques that optimize for less energy consumption above all else. This would lead to better technologies and thus environment friendly mining techniques.

That's the insidious thing about PoW, though: it will absorb efficiency improvements by design. If a chip came out tomorrow that halved the amount of energy used per hash, instead of halving the CO2 use of PoW, miners would be incentivized just to double the network hash rate.

Re: China declares cryptocurrency deals ‘illegal’

#404

Wow, imagine living in a country where the legal financial assets you own can be turned criminal where accessing them is punished with hard labor. Sounds like a dystopian nightmare.

Imagine living in a country that allows you to destroy the environment for a fake currency. Your worldview is ridiculous.

This is an overly aggressive tone that will cause knee-jerk pushback, but there is an argument that it is exactly the thing we should expect of our government, to correct for externalities.

This is effectively not that different than a company dumping chemical in the local river rather than disposing of them properly. They are encroaching on my rights to a livable planet for their own personal financial gain.

Re: China declares cryptocurrency deals ‘illegal’

#405

I hope the rest of world follows. There is nothing more volatile than a decentralised crypto currency. The amount of people making a profit from it is less than 5% and energy consumption is beyond acceptable. Crypto as a tech to serve something different is totally fine of course.

The hate for crypto in HN is just tiring.

Re: China declares cryptocurrency deals ‘illegal’

#406

I'm not sure why the title of the article focuses on mining. China had already banned mining. This was very visible as a drop in the hash rate over the summer[1]. What has been announced now (by the Chinese central bank and a bunch of regulators) is that all crypto related transactions will be banned. [1] http://bitcoin.sipa.be/

There's a lot of vague language in these types of threads. What does "banned" mean? Does that mean illegal and punishable by death? Or does that mean, connections to identified crypto computing resources will be blocked by the great firewall?

Re: China declares cryptocurrency deals ‘illegal’

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be trivial to find the source of high-powered wifi/antennas. Consider how easy it is already for one to find the source of an unlicensed ham radio stream. It's definitely not impossible to obfuscate and use crypto even in a country where it's banned, but it isn't that easy.

Indeed. There's a huge difference between one or several actions and habitual behavior. You can find a method to get away with anything once. Operating on a daily basis where the government only has to catch you once is far less practical.

This is true for lots of virtuous acts or acts of survival under authoritative regimes, such as hiding Jews from the Nazis or selling your surplus harvest under Stalin. It’s only if you are privileged (or, arguably, ignorant) to not consider on balance the counterfactual costs of undermining technologies which could de-risk such acts for those being oppressed. (Which may include a future-you.)

Re: China declares cryptocurrency deals ‘illegal’

#408

Wow, imagine living in a country where the legal financial assets you own can be turned criminal where accessing them is punished with hard labor. Sounds like a dystopian nightmare.

Imagine living in a country that allows you to destroy the environment for a fake currency. Your worldview is ridiculous.

The ban also applies to proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies.

Re: China declares cryptocurrency deals ‘illegal’

#409
post #386
post #304

China seems to be hell bent on exiting the global speculative markets. Can the stock markets absorb this shock?

To be fair, it is well accepted that high inflation is bad as everyone stops spending. This holds true for asset inflation as well - you can be damned sure that in the current environment tonnes of people will be taking money out of the system to dump into markets

High inflation encourages spending. It is deflation that discourages spending. High inflation means that the money you have today will purchase less in the future, thus it pushes people to buy now rather than later when things will be more expensive in nominal terms. High inflation combined with low interest rates, will also increase financial speculation pretty much across the board.

The problem with high inflation is that it usually (but not recently) goes hand in hand with higher interest rates (i.e. money costs more). Which tends to discourage business borrowing, which acts as a damper on non-financial investment (i.e. spending on factories, marketing, R&D, etc.). This has the effect of slowing down economic growth.

On the other hand, high inflation/high interest rate environments tend to arise when growth is high. Because high growth tends to go hand in hand with a rise in wages, increases in demand (which shifts the demand curve, and thus raises prices), increases in financial speculation, etc.

There are a ton more "on the other hands". Economic analysis is complex and difficult because it's a tangled mess of interdependent feedback loops that constantly change. A single policy action has an avalanche of cascading effects, some of which will be counter to the policy objective. I'm not suggesting humanity should just roll over in the face of this challenge. We should just be aware that it's a "hard problem" and there are never any simple solutions.

Re: China declares cryptocurrency deals ‘illegal’

#410

Excellent news for the climate.

Most mining has already shifted out of China, and Bitcoin mining is a very small percentage of electricity usage on the scale of "all electricity usage" - there are plenty of bigger fish (the argument then turns, validly, to the usefulness of said bigger fish in comparison to bitcoin).

Here come the comments of people who see no value in crypto calming it has no value.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

A few years ago people laughed at me for buying bitcoin, it's good to see bitcoin adoption moving along nicely.

Post reply on HN