Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by bko » Wed, Jun 01, 2022, 12:58 PM UTC

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…

The hard money standard (e.g. precious metals) is older and has outlived nearly all fiat currencies and will likely outlive the existing currencies.

What do you think will be worth more in 100 years from now? 1 US dollar or the equivalent of gold? How about 500 years? 1000 years? My money is on the gold.

Every fiat will be stable until it blows up. It will necessarily be mismanaged in a long enough time line, and based on history it really isn't that long.

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

#112

Post by pjc50 » Wed, Jun 01, 2022, 1:01 PM UTC

DebtDeflation wrote: post #83

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. Surely there is a middle ground between "every single transaction that has ever occurred in the history of the blockchain is public and visible to all" and "no transactions are ever visible to anyone including governments investigating crimes that have exercised due process in obtaining warrants and subpoenas".

Unfortunately this is a problem of electronic money. Physical money is hard to track in small quantities, but as the quantities get larger it becomes more obvious and harder to hide the suitcases full of cash. (Or, in the Iraq invasion, C130s full of cash: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1 )

Electronic money of whatever form is equally trackable regardless of the value of the transaction. That forces a world where either you can drop country-destabilising quantities of money anywhere without any law enforcement or every microtransaction ends up in the security services database.

Anonymous billions are all fun and games until the second plane hits the tower.

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

#113

Post by jameshart » Wed, Jun 01, 2022, 1:04 PM UTC

dqpb wrote: post #85

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…

You could replace “crypto” with “web” and it would make these statements equally broad and absurd.

This is the very definition of a shallow dismissal. You are trying to insinuate that people who believe crypto is bad technology and bad for society, are doing the equivalent of arguing that the web is bad technology and bad for society.

But 1) the arguments against crypto are specific to crypto; 2) the very people who are arguing against crypto are the same people who have been the most vocal advocates of an open web; 3) this is a dismissal from a technologist perspective of the finance industry's self-interested pro-crypto lobbying - there's no obvious parallel of an industry lobbying for 'pro-web' policy over technologists' objections that you can analogize this to. If anything, web-related regulatory discussions in the 1990s were the opposite - entrenched industries lobbying against technological arguments.

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

#114

Post by pjc50 » Wed, Jun 01, 2022, 1:07 PM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #13

RandomLensman wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd still argue that if you want a society with different rules then there are two broad choices: (i) get enough people on your side to change the society you are in; or (ii) move to a society that operates closer to what you want Technological escape hatches are probably at best a stop-gap measure, but not a replacement for (i) or (ii)

Usually yes, but some technologies are so powerful they do reshape what is possible for society. Things like birth control, the internet, military technologies like cavalry or guns, the development of limited liability corporations. These things are more powerful than mere laws in what they accomplished. Privacy-coins could be the next big one. It switches accounting from being a tool of coercion (c.f. the famous cas…

> how they could stop me doing stuff like donating to political causes I agree with

Like I said upthread, this lasts until the second plane strikes the tower.

The invasion of Ukraine by Russia brought a huge, unprecedented wave of financial sanctions. If cryptocurrency actually worked for private, uncensorable transactions, they would have shrugged this off and moved to Monero. Perhaps we shouldn't rule this out. But remember the level of law changes to privacy and surveillance rolled out after 9/11 as well. We've not yet seen the first terrorist attack that would not have been possible without uncensorable cryptocurrency funding; the response to that will be something to behold.

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

#115

Post by pjc50 » Wed, Jun 01, 2022, 1:08 PM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #24

RandomLensman wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd would say none of the technologies listed even closely approach the impact of social technologies such as rule of law, democracy, etc. If your fellow citizens in aggregate really don't like what you do and want to stop you, the will eventually find a way. You want a society that does not police where money flows - which is a big change and there is no evidence that broadly people like to open the taps on things l…

Nobody likes homelessness. How is democracy going at putting an end to it? The list of similar examples is endless; democracies are forced to put up with a lot of stuff that nobody likes when everything that is tried turns out not to work. Democracy is a very powerful technology, no argument there. But it can't overcome technical realities. It is better at adjusting to them and giving up when the cost gets too high.

I think every time the subject comes up we find that people (not themselves homeless) do like homelessness, and regard it as a suitable punishment for failing to contribute to society, being mentally ill, or using hard drugs.

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

#116

Post by martialg » Wed, Jun 01, 2022, 1:16 PM UTC

So - I love thoughtful criticism.

My ego doesn’t, but I generally find it very valuable.

This letter is honestly not thoughtful criticism.

It reads like a group of academics and specialists annoyed they were too early to profit from a technology they spent a lot of time thinking about esoterically and avoids specificity in…well… any meaningful way.

It also makes no effort to segment the space.

If a critical letter created by supposedly credible experts in a field can’t spare a paragraph to delineate between DeFi, NFTs, L1’s, smart contracts, stablecoins, and whatever else is bothering them then I think it’s fair to assume they don’t know the difference.

And if they don’t know the difference then why are we even reading this letter?

It’s a waste of our time (and theirs) to try and unpack what is pretty clearly frustration at the fact that the effective application of basic research is all that matters for adoption.

I think (at its core) everything crypto is a novel economic incentive layer wrapped in a technology package.

This creates the opportunity for blazingly fast user feedback loops and incentive alignment that wasn’t possible before (for better or worse).

Taken from that perspective, this letter misses basically everything interesting about the potential of Crypto.

So.

Read it. Form your own opinion. And move on with your day.

Gm everyone

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

#117

Post by jameshart » Wed, Jun 01, 2022, 1:17 PM UTC

ryanmercer wrote: post #36

Quoted post unavailable.

I don't think the software industry has quite got its head around the idea yet that it is possible for our field to produce a technology that is as harmful as tetraethyl lead.

We kid ourselves that the worst thing software can do is a Therac-25-style bug. So long as it's 'just software', though, with no hardware interfaces plugged into actual living people, how badly can we possibly screw up?

That sense that 'well, at least we're not the tobacco or petroleum industry', puts a real limit on the degree to which software people are willing to engage with the ethics of what they do.

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

#118

Post by jameshart » Wed, Jun 01, 2022, 1:27 PM UTC

f0e4c2f7 wrote: post #5

I wonder if people lobbied to keep the internet regulated and out of the hands of the general public. Surely someone must have.

Bad analogy.

In this case you have a finance industry trying to get congress to give them free rein to experiment with crypto. They're asking for latitude around things like securities law, financial disclosure requirements, anti-money-laundering, consumer finance protection, etc. - with the excuse being 'we have to be allowed to explore innovative technologies!'

And what this letter represents is technologists trying to say, there's nothing sufficiently interesting here technologically speaking to justify granting that license.

There's simply no equivalent to this in 'internet' regulation terms. ARPAnet wasn't opened up to commercial use based on finance industry lobbying over the objections of technologists.

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

#119

Post by rvz » Wed, Jun 01, 2022, 1:31 PM UTC

Kbelicius wrote: post #108

rvz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to be going great for Stripe [0] and Moneygram [1] and FIDE Online Arena [2], but obviously crypto-skeptics and crypto-maximalists will not tell you that. Perhaps these companies waited for this executive order: [3] to go through before getting back into using cryptocurrencies. The reality is that both the hard crypto-skeptics and the crypto-maximalists will be disappointed in achieving their utopian goals of f…

> Seems to be going great for Stripe [0] and Moneygram [1] and FIDE Online Arena [2], but obviously crypto-skeptics and crypto-maximalists will not tell you that. It must be going disastrously when your 3 examples of things going grate are a start of a pilot project, an announcement of a project and what seems to amount to a sponsorship deal. And you wonder why people don't speak more widely about it.

So those 3 projects I linked to have all been scrapped, abandoned or cancelled?, which would qualify your claim as what you described as 'going disastrously' assuming you have read the whole article and its links then?

Can you at least backup your claims on them 'going disastrously' and being cancelled, scrapped or abandoned rather than making very unsubstantiated and baseless claims? Since I have already backed up my claims with links that these projects are still alive?

> And you wonder why people don't speak more widely about it.

Or is it because these companies know that the ones they selected are suitable for their use cases and are compliant with regulations and are not part of this extreme 'all cryptocurrencies is scam, ponzi, planet incinerating' narrative that these 'technologists' are pushing?

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

#120

Post by dubswithus » Wed, Jun 01, 2022, 1:34 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #104

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?

There's a reason random startups aren't allowed to make IPOs directly to the public, and attempts to circumvent this with ICOs got the hammer brought down on them.

We have WeFunder and StartEngine. I'm sure there are a few others by now as well.