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India seeks to block most cryptocurrencies in new bill, government says

reuters.com

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Re: India seeks to block most cryptocurrencies in new bill, government says

#111

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> The whole of Eth is planned to move to 100% PoS Quarter 1 of 2022 I have heard this so so many times. ETH moving to PoS fully in X months. I'll believe it when it happens. And I'm glad they plan on making it happen cause there way too many things harming the environment already. A major cryptocurrency reducing their environmental impact is welcomed.

If you follow the Ethereum core developers on Twitter you can track the progress. Current status is (1) people have locked ~$30-40B worth of Ethereum into the proof of stake chain, money which can't be retrieved until the merge (2) the Ethereum team has a merged testnet running on which all the different client developer teams are participating. They're just hunting for edge case bugs now, too much money at stake to…

This is a part of crypto I do not fully grasp. How much power do the developers vs the miners have over the direction of the project?

What happens if the devs go crazy and decide to eg. Ban transactions smaller than $1M worth of coins in code.

Someone made the point the other day that miners might not fancy this PoS change because they’re heavily invested in equipment.

Re: India seeks to block most cryptocurrencies in new bill, government says

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gift cards and p2p exchange for fiat using a dex or another service. As long as there is money to be made, the Indian crypto black market will thrive and grow.

Who exactly will be making money? Bitcoin is already extremely illiquid, regulation like this will make it even more illiquid. What a ludicrous take.

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Re: India seeks to block most cryptocurrencies in new bill, government says

#114
post #109
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 90s many people said the same thing about "being online" and "having email". Writing letters and meeting in person works just fine, they said. Crypto makes so many things so much more efficient that not having access to it will be like not having access to the internet today.

> Crypto makes so many things so much more efficient Crypto does the same things a database does, except in a much more expensive and inefficient fashion.

Efficiency and robustness usually do anticorrelate.

Re: India seeks to block most cryptocurrencies in new bill, government says

#115
post #84

More of a reason for Polygon to go succeed with their zk plans.

Would you mind to elaborate?

In cryptography, a zero-knowledge proof or zero-knowledge protocol is a method by which one party (the prover) can prove to another party (the verifier) that a given statement is true, without conveying any information apart from the fact that the statement is indeed true.

You can build untraceable anonymous cryptocurrencies using these algorithms.

Re: India seeks to block most cryptocurrencies in new bill, government says

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an important point - I think a lot of us tech people like to think "no it only exists on the internet the govt can't touch it! It's like international waters!", but then you have countries that can completely restrict or shut down the internet. As long as the infrastructure exists in the real world and is controlled by a govt, then the "imaginary online stuff" is still ultimately under their control. Even in…

Countries can just ask you to prove how you earned income, and jail you if your proof is unsatisfactory to them. India banning cryptocoins doesn't mean that people will automatically be jailed for mining on day one. It just means that anyone using cryptocoin to avoid paying Indian taxes can end up jailed when their expenditure exceeds their provable income, or when their documented income is traceable to cryptocoin,…

At least concerning the tax issue, the US government doesn't even need to do that. If they squeeze the credit card and banks as they've done for the adult industry and marijuana industry, we will see the entire market deflate. The only reason crypto is okay in the West is because an offramp into fiat is provided. Once that offramp gets closed, it's game over and we are back to 2010 in terms of crypto value.

Re: India seeks to block most cryptocurrencies in new bill, government says

#117
post #38
post #26

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All ownership (digital or not) is nothing but a social contract. The cryptocurrency (or normal currency) exists because enough people agree to recognise it. You can buy and own a domain name. If trust in DNS is violated, we'll have much bigger problems.

Owning a token means you can perform certain actions on a distributed system. No social contract needed. You own the token by owning a secret key which gives you the power to move it. It's like owning a key to a door. It gives you the power to lock and unlock the door. No social contract needed. You can not own a domain. You can only pay a registrar to have them talk to a registry. You then are at the mercy of both.…

The distributed network exists because we collectively agree to host the nodes, and because we put trust in that network, and in its supply chain (application, OS, hardware, electricity, clay, etc). Ownership is built on that trust - exactly the same as your ownership of a domain name is built on the trust in the registrar, ICANN, root name servers, and so on.

Suppose a hypothetical scenario, where a malicious actor sneaks in a bug into the node's code, that causes the requests signed by your key to be rejected, and the code gets deployed to the majority of the network. Your key/token becomes effectively worthless.

Suppose a (much less hypothetical) scenario, where a state decides to outlaw the technology, which puts node operators/users at a legal risk, disincentivizing the use of the network locally, and diminishing its value globally. You still "own" the token, but it's that much less useful.

There are different considerations, trade-offs, threat models, failure modes, horror stories, but nothing about ownership in a decentralised network is _fundamentally_ different - it's still built on trust.

Re: India seeks to block most cryptocurrencies in new bill, government says

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto industry must not be contributing enough to politicians, like they seem to do in the US.

They need to sponsor more sports teams

That's an interesting idea!

Re: India seeks to block most cryptocurrencies in new bill, government says

#120
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Proof-of-stake is basically a fantasy [...] hand-waving. It having not happened yet is pretty good evidence of this being a fantasy. This couldn't be further from reality. Blackcoin (2014), Peercoin, Decred, etc... Eth 2.0 is running, right now, with billions in value. The whole of Eth is planned to move to 100% PoS quarter 1 of 2022.

> The whole of Eth is planned to move to 100% PoS Quarter 1 of 2022 I have heard this so so many times. ETH moving to PoS fully in X months. I'll believe it when it happens. And I'm glad they plan on making it happen cause there way too many things harming the environment already. A major cryptocurrency reducing their environmental impact is welcomed.

Avalanche is using the Avalanche consensus ( https://docs.avax.network/learn/platform-overview/avalanche-... ) and is decentrally processing a huge volume of transactions in a scalable and fast fashion.

The more than 1000 validator nodes require a proof of stake.

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