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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

#91

Post by usrn »

ghuntley wrote: post #4

From: https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1531920908696358912 Today the global community of technologists sent a letter to Congress urging them to resist the crypto industry’s lobbying influence. The letter was signed by some of the most respected scholars and technologists in our field. And now we need your help. Crypto fraud is spiraling out of control. So-called "web3" is not going great. Regulators are paralyzed a…

There are plenty of far worse life destroying scams that we don't regulate. Variable interest rate loans are a huge example.

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

#93

Post by jcbrand »

politician wrote: post #78
jcbrand wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

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

The hash rate doesn't change the rate of currency issuance, at most what it can do is change the rate at which transactions are verified.

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

#94

Post by [deleted] »

suriyaG wrote: post #44
dubswithus wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all blockchain is bad because 99.9% of tokens fail, why wouldn’t all startups be bad since a similar number fail as well?

I think, Because startup investment is regulated and not accessible to any average joe. Else, we'd be overrun with conmen trying to make a quick buck. Not that we have less of them now.

[deleted]

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

#95

Post by rvz »

ryanmercer wrote: post #54
rvz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once again, why are companies like Stripe [0], Moneygram [1], still using cryptocurrencies then? Perhaps they recognise that not all of them are like what you just described, and they waited for further regulations to be clearer and chose mature cryptocurrencies to use for what they needed? Also why haven't the law makers in congress, the SEC and the White House totally banned all of them yet but are instead writing…

>Once again, why are companies like Stripe [0], Moneygram [1], still using cryptocurrencies then? Because they want to be part of the current buzzword, just like every company throwing around "AI" and "machine learning". For the most part those companies are also fairly quickly converting any crypto into hard fiat, their risk is entirely minimal, yet the fees they are charging are quite profitable. They're mostly act…

> Because they want to be part of the current buzzword, just like every company throwing around "AI" and "machine learning".

So 'But current buzzword'. Just like 'open-source', 'privacy', 'internet of things', etc and your point is? You still have not given a valid reason for those companies to drop the ones mentioned in the article I linked in my previous comment and instead did a very bold sweeping statement (and dodged my other questions). By now they should have drop those cryptocurrencies or technologies mentioned in the articles given what you have described is happening on other blockchains, and they still haven't.

Maybe they know and recognise that not all of them are like that. But nice try at generalizing all of them.

> For the most part those companies are also fairly quickly converting any crypto into hard fiat, their risk is entirely minimal, yet the fees they are charging are quite profitable.

Assuming you read both of the links in my previous comment are you sure it is fiat or was it a stablecoin? And why do you the risk is minimal? It plays into my point on why they both waited for regulations to become clearer. They will both co-exist under regulations, especially a few stablecoins; but not all of them.

> The vast majority of crypto is currently speculation/pump and dump and illegal commerce. Period. It is cancer, electricity-hungry cancer.

So from an absolutist statement of 'crypto is cancer', 'electricity-hungry cancer' and sweeping all of them under the same brush to now back-peddling to 'vast majority of crypto'?

I wonder if you have realised that the 'vast majority of crypto' is not anonymous but pseudonymous since anyone can trace where the money or illegal activity is going. If such criminals tried to cash out that money to fiat, the exchanges will disallow it with KYC / AML checks. I'm not even defending privacy coins that will also be subject to tighter regulations [0] [1] than cryptocurrencies that use a transparent ledger and the exchanges are already de-listing many privacy coins to comply with incoming regulations. [0] [1]

Once again, crypto and some projects are not totally going away 100%, but non-compliant cryptocurrencies and projects will wither away.

[0] https://www.euronews.com/next/2021/07/21/eu-will-make-bitcoi...

[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20220309IP...

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

#97

Post by qsort »

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

The paper linked in the Wikipedia citation for that line has the following in its abstract:

"The governance of central banks has two dimensions: corporate governance and public governance. Public governance is an institutional framework whereby the general public governs a central bank by and through the legislative and executive bodies in a country (...)".

"Independence of the central bank" means independence from direct intrusion by the executive branch, in the same sense the judiciary is independent from political interference.

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

#98

Post by UncleEntity »

walnutclosefarm wrote: post #63
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…

> 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…

> To fulfill its role as a stable store of value, a currency has to be managed.

But they don’t optimize for “stable store of value” over “full employment” or “hidden taxation through monetary inflation”.

In fact, they have the opposite goal because “the velocity of money” is negatively influenced by people using money as a store of value. Keeping money in a savings account and collecting interest is bad for society because reasons.

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

#99

Post by birracerveza »

throwaway290 wrote: post #11
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…

You bet I think those people act with my interests in mind, since I elected the people who appointed them (unlike random scammers in croin space). The panopticon you refer to is called "human society", by the way. You cannot participate in one and maintain unlimited freedom. If you are an evil jerk who kidnaps my child or steals life savings from my mom I want to be sure your assets can be seized. If you want to buil…

> You bet I think those people act with my interests in mind, since I elected the people who appointed them (unlike random scammers in croin space).

I want to live in this wonderland too, where are you?

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

#100

Post by jcbrand »

mjburgess wrote: post #74
jcbrand wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 whic…

The issuance of Bitcoin is about as fair as one could hope for, for a non-state currency.

Satoshi advertised the currency and the start of mining beforehand, to give other people a chance to participate. There was no pre-mine.

In the early days there were faucets that handed out bitcoins for free.

Due to the boom and bust cycle of Bitcoin, many of the early holders cashed out instead of holding all the way to untold wealth. This is actually a nice side-effect of the early stages of Bitcoin adoption.

Very early holders of Bitcoin had to take the risk that the currency was somehow flawed and would go to zero, in some sense, the gains they made are a function of the risk they took.

The solution to wealth inequality is not to force everything to be equal, it's to allow both upward and downward mobility. The wealthy must be allowed to fail and not be bailed out.

Interestingly, bailouts are a common feature of the fiat monetary system.

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