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Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

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Re: Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

#71

Post by dools »

jcbrand wrote: post #61
dools wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Which propaganda videos would you prefer I watch? The Federal Reserve (by far the most important one) is privately owned, as are Belgium, Greece, Japan, South Africa, Switzerland, Turkey and the Bank of Italy. The ECB is owned by central banks of member states, some of which are privately owned. Private ownership is any case one issue, the other is the fact the CBs are structured in such a way to be resistant to poli…

> Which propaganda videos would you prefer I watch?

This is a good start:

https://youtu.be/sT1KoXayDNU

Re: Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

#72

Post by BobbyJo »

jcbrand wrote: post #68
agentultra wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, we reserve the right to dictate what you spend your money on and if you want to donate to causes (e.g. Wikileaks or truckers) that we don't approve of, we'll block your bank account and cut you off from the system. There are some things that are plain illegal. If you’re laundering money, selling illegal drugs, running guns, funding terrorist groups, etc you run the risk of getting caught and having your account…

We’re not living in a dictatorship (yet). Funny how people here assume we all live in the same country. There are lots of people on HN who live in dictatorships. If you’re interested in how money works you should read a book or two about it. It’s pretty interesting. Thanks for the condescension. Money printing is a colloquial term used to describe various ways in which the money supply is manipulated by Central Banks…

The article is about Washington....

Re: Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

#73

Post by Hizonner »

mjburgess wrote: post #57
jcbrand wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily enough, the people who live under dictators, despots, cartels and organized criminals often more easily realise the benefits of money that cannot be censored, cannot have its issuance be manipulated, is permissionless and very difficult to confiscate. (Talking about Bitcoin here. Not all crypto applies)

Uhuh... and if the state, with its monopoly on violence, wishes to ban these currencies? D'you think an "ordinary person" is going to risk being thrown in a gulag? The problem with all these tech utopians is they think the relevant problems are technical: we've solved trust! (Between machines negotiating over a network). We've solved currency manipulation (oh its not a currency, it's an asset; and oh it can be manipu…

The point is that that "ordinary person" is already at risk of the gulag, and would like to reduce that risk by hiding information.

Re: Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

#74

Post by mjburgess »

jcbrand wrote: post #59
mjburgess wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhuh... and if the state, with its monopoly on violence, wishes to ban these currencies? D'you think an "ordinary person" is going to risk being thrown in a gulag? The problem with all these tech utopians is they think the relevant problems are technical: we've solved trust! (Between machines negotiating over a network). We've solved currency manipulation (oh its not a currency, it's an asset; and oh it can be manipu…

Uhuh... and if the state, with its monopoly on violence, wishes to ban these currencies? They can try, but it's very difficult to do. I hear we'll win the war on drugs any day now. All the problems are social, not technological No solution is 100% social or technological, you need both. The existence of cryptocurrencies doesn't remove the need for social coordination.

Right, but you realise that a system in which the handful of early-stakers have all of the power; and in which no change or revision is possible; and in which blackmail & abuse of key-holders is necessitated to obtain their funds; and in which there is no economy of the currency to provide a grounding in value; and in which therefore it is the late-stakers who provide liquidiy to the early feudal lords... and in which ...

Is a worse situation, right?

Crypto is just fedualism with land=coin. Really. That's what it is.

It's about as anti-freedom as one can imagine. It's "freedom in form" and not in content. It's the freedom of the colonizer on new land, and the oppression of all else who live there. A necessary oppression, not open to revision, and executed by machine.

Re: Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

#75

Post by Seriomino »

olalonde wrote: post #60
bettysdiagnose wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you try to make something private, then you're helping money launderers, criminals and pedophiles. But you can't just hand wave concerns regarding money laundering and other criminality away. If you want to, you should just say "these things don't matter that much", but don't just avoid them entirely. >Lastly, we reserve the right to manipulate the money supply. It's enough for you to know that we are experts and…

> But you can't just hand wave concerns regarding money laundering and other criminality away. If you want to, you should just say "these things don't matter that much", but don't just avoid them entirely. Actually you can. The war on "money laundering" is a total failure. Those laws costs billions of dollars in compliance, stifle competition, harm innocent people by excluding them from the financial system (estimate…

Trustworthy source you have: "The Cato Institute is a public policy research organization—or think tank—that creates a presence for and promotes libertarian ideas in policy debates."

I'm totally against money laundering. It takes the money away from us people for streets, school and healthy care.

And crypto is not providing any solution to this at all. So why not fixing that issue inside the crypto bro fan club first and than trying to replace our current fiat with it?

Re: Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

#76

Post by cdiddy2 »

chalst wrote: post #69
jcbrand wrote: post #6

Similarly, most public blockchain-based financial products are a disaster for financial privacy; the exceptions are a handful of emerging privacy-focused blockchain finance alternatives, and these are a gift to money-launderers. Damned if you do and damned if you don't. The existing, centralized electronic payment systems are a disaster for financial privacy, and it'll only get worse with CBDCs. If you try to make so…

> Damned if you do and damned if you don't. Conventional banking combines a moderate level of privacy with effective measures against money laundering. Why shouldn't we ask that crypto be judged against this baseline?

It's not clear that AML regulation actually is all that effective. It also makes it a lot harder for competitors to start in the banking and finance industry.

"Based on 2009 data, the UN, with US State Department assistance, calculated the global success rate of money laundering controls at just 0.2 percent (UNODC 2011, 14, 119, 131), but, as noted above, the confiscation rate might be 0.07 percent. In other words, despite ubiquitous money laundering controls, criminals retain up to 99.93 percent of criminal proceeds."

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1...

Re: Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

#77

Post by Seriomino »

jcbrand wrote: post #62
qsort wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a pernicious myth that there is some meaningful democratic oversight over monetary policy Latinate words are not a useful cover when you're lying. All Western central banks are effectively a branch of government and are directly responsible to Congress/euparl/$local_variant, and are run by a bunch of politicians (the chair of the Fed is Powell and the president of the ECB is Lagarde, ffs). The notion that they…

The second paragraph on Wikipedia: Central banks in most developed nations are institutionally independent from political interference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank

You used 'privately owned' to indicate it being shady.

Re: Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

#78

Post by politician »

jcbrand wrote: post #66
walnutclosefarm wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lastly, we reserve the right to manipulate the money supply. You may dislike the way central banks control and manipulate the money supply, but the reality is that an unmanaged currency is generally a disaster for everyone. To fulfill its role as a stable store of value, a currency has to be managed. The notion that an inherently deflationary unit of accounting (such as Bitcoin), or a completely unmanaged one, or o…

Quoted post unavailable.

Bitcoin is a managed monetary system whose policy lever is hash rate.

Re: Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

#79

Post by jcbrand »

Seriomino wrote: post #70
jcbrand wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

And Bitcoin automagically fixes that? How? Due to it being a PoW system? Suddenly fraud is no longer possible? (It still is) Money laundering is no longer possible? (It still is) Inflation/Deflation save? (It still is) So tell me, what is crypto fixing? That instead of experts in the central bank the market itself just does what? Definitely nothing pro consumer. There are reasons why banks get requirements from the s…

In the least Bitcoin provides an option to opt-out, an alternative that puts some pressure on central banks to have sane monetary policy.

It allows people in Lebanon (~200% inflation), Zimbabwe (~700% inflation) and Turkey (70% inflation) to maintain the purchasing power of their wealth and to protect it from confiscation.

There are many other advantages of Bitcoin, but these are already significant.

Re: Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

#80

Post by cdiddy2 »

Seriomino wrote: post #75
olalonde wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But you can't just hand wave concerns regarding money laundering and other criminality away. If you want to, you should just say "these things don't matter that much", but don't just avoid them entirely. Actually you can. The war on "money laundering" is a total failure. Those laws costs billions of dollars in compliance, stifle competition, harm innocent people by excluding them from the financial system (estimate…

Trustworthy source you have: "The Cato Institute is a public policy research organization—or think tank—that creates a presence for and promotes libertarian ideas in policy debates." I'm totally against money laundering. It takes the money away from us people for streets, school and healthy care. And crypto is not providing any solution to this at all. So why not fixing that issue inside the crypto bro fan club first…

Alternative source: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1...
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