India seeks to block most cryptocurrencies in new bill, government says • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by rip_netrunner » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 10:53 PM UTC

joshgrib wrote: post #30

joe_the_user wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's illegal to exchange goods or official currency for cryptocurrency in the nation you are in, the usefulness of cryptocurrency is going to be considerably constrained. This depends on how thorough or draconian the state is but a lot of people just shy away from illegal activity without enforcement being that strong. After all, if buy a tangible good, I want legal title to it and having engaged in an illegal tra…

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…

Ah yes, the easy solution is just to ban all the exchanges. That'll do it! And then they'll just have to ban the peer-to-peer decentralized exchanges (dydx, sushiswap, uniswap, xrpl). That might be a little tricky though...

It's just like governments trying to ban torrenting and p2p file sharing. Look at how well THAT went.

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

#182

Post by terafo » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 10:53 PM UTC

0xB31B1B wrote: post #162

csomar wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even at 1/4 of that, it's $650bn. That's a tons of value. > like 99.9% of transactions are valueless gambling OR money laundering. You need to prove that. GBTC and CME options volumes/open value are in the billions. I don't think people are laundering money through these instruments.

You don't need to launder money through GBTC to get exposure to the assets that money launderers use (BTC) to launder money and reap the upside of a growth market in cryptocurrency based moneylaundering. its a smart play tbh, but the 99% off chain economic benefit from crypto today is money laundering, evading KYC protocols, tax evasion, ransomware related transfers.

> 99% off chain economic benefit from crypto today is money laundering, evading KYC protocols, tax evasion, ransomware related transfers

You still need to prove that though.

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

#183

Post by NaturalPhallacy » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 10:55 PM UTC

instagraham wrote: post #6

sombremesa wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn’t that just lead to a black market? Especially in a country that loves its informal economy like India?

It's not as easy to participate in the informal economy as it used to be. Everything from one's bank to one's mobile number and govt id are linked. If you want to deposit funds in an exchange, you'll need some form of KYC--barring which your bank debit/credit card is linked anyway. The banks, even before the ban (which has yet to come), were keeping track of customers making payments to exchanges. In some cases, they…

Banks and payment processors have been our de facto shadow government for years now.

They cut off Wikileaks, the pirate bay, various kink/porn sites, and any entity they don't like really. Usually all it takes is a warning from them to completely shutdown an entity, or worse, force them to obey. Coinbase voluntarily doesn't deal in Monero for this reason for example.

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

#184

Post by cmh89 » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 10:58 PM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #82

TekMol wrote: 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 Like what? I can currently pay for any legal physical or virtual good I can think of using a conventional credit card. Crypto might or might help privacy and might allow you to buy illegal things more easily. It's a hedge against inflation but a number of things have that quality. The use of crypto seem inherently confined to keeping the state from doing things to pe…

I think there are a lot of "W3 revisionists" or people who are otherwise maybe too young to remember the mid-90s but from what I remember there were plenty of people who saw the potential of the internet. Twelve years after the web was laid out at CERN we had Google not to mention AOL, Ebay, Craigslist, etc..

I've been hearing the same story on crypto since 2011/2012 and it's become no more useful to the average person. The only thing that's changed is more people who know nothing about technology are raving about how its going to change the world so I should buy Bitcoin.

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

#185

Post by joe_the_user » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 11:10 PM UTC

louloulou wrote: post #141

csomar wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This gets repeated a lot around here but is far from the truth. Drugs are still traded, and so are other "illegal" items. And trading drugs is quite risky comparing to trading crypto (especially fully decentralized). > usefulness of cryptocurrency is going to be considerably constrained Sure, but you are missing why 3rd worlds like China, India and Morocco are trying to restrict crypto. They are worried about capital…

Yeah, people making these arguments haven't lived in developing countries with terrible, inconsistent, reactionary, arbitrarily applied laws. Where you have to "break the law" constantly in order to survive.

Sure but bitcoin's value would be a lot less if it was only being used to skirt the abuses of third world regimes - and when those same third world regimes make illegal.

Most people who buy bitcoin today in the first world do so because it's made money for people.

Sure, in third world countries and elsewhere, people skirt or break the law on a regular basis. But they still don't it for kicks and they don't do it for "right to cryptocurrency", they do it because it will get them something and making crypto illegal will mean it gets people less and people use it less, reducing demand and price (minus the manipulation bitcoin experiences but at some point that manipulation won't be manageable).

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

#186

Post by joe_the_user » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 11:14 PM UTC

wyager wrote: post #100

joe_the_user wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't true if your objective is just to protect wealth long-term. I said illegality constrains the usefulness of cryptocurrency. Long-term gains is one of the remaining hypothetical uses but other uses are limited. So your claim doesn't refute my point. With fewer practical uses, we might see bitcoin's long terms value decline but that's speculation.

Wealth storage is a practical use case. This is a weird thing to grasp, but it's actually perfectly reasonable (I.e. utilitarian and stable) for an asset to be "purely monetized", in the sense that it has no value whatsoever except from its capacity to store value. That said, you're right that ability to actually spend bitcoin probably shows up in any PDE that accurately models its market dynamics. If 90% of countrie…

Wealth storage is a practical use case.

It's one practical use case. Bitcoin's value rests on multiple use cases and eliminating other uses cases reduces demand for bitcoin. And that effect also reduces bitcoin use for wealth storage (but might not eliminate, sure).

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

#187

Post by whb07 » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 11:30 PM UTC

scottcodie wrote: post #164

csomar wrote: post #144

The discussions around crypto here kind of proves that you cannot use popular opinion in HN to predict the future. People were very negative (and still are) about crypto. Market cap kept proving them wrong year after year and we are here with around $2.6 Trillion and yet people here still think crypto is going to die. It's interesting because in startups, you learn from the first day that you should listen to custome…

Inflation isn't bad. Most of the world doesn't suffer from hyper-inflation. Decentralized finance doesn't provide a tremendous benefit over a trusted third party. High volatility and high transaction cost makes it a poor choice for a currency. Most of the worlds economy already runs on digital transactions without the need for crypto. There are plenty of reasons why crypto doesn't make sense and it is perfectly ratio…

Tell that to the retiree living on a fixed sum for life.

Of course inflation is bad you should see what $100 over 10 years at 2% inflation is.

Now try it for 6%+.

It’s the reverse compounding for savings people should strive for.

Who did you learn your basic economics from?

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

#188

Post by rfd4sgmk8u » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 11:39 PM UTC

scottcodie wrote: post #164

csomar wrote: post #144

The discussions around crypto here kind of proves that you cannot use popular opinion in HN to predict the future. People were very negative (and still are) about crypto. Market cap kept proving them wrong year after year and we are here with around $2.6 Trillion and yet people here still think crypto is going to die. It's interesting because in startups, you learn from the first day that you should listen to custome…

Inflation isn't bad. Most of the world doesn't suffer from hyper-inflation. Decentralized finance doesn't provide a tremendous benefit over a trusted third party. High volatility and high transaction cost makes it a poor choice for a currency. Most of the worlds economy already runs on digital transactions without the need for crypto. There are plenty of reasons why crypto doesn't make sense and it is perfectly ratio…

Inflation is bad. Hyperinflation is worse. Reported CPI does not reflect actual inflation. One just needs to look at asset prices, stock prices, etc to see what is happening. You and everyone else is being robbed, every day, and it gets worse...

I strongly suggest you look into why people would want "censorship resistant, decentralized, non-state, peer to peer currencies". The existing financial system doesn't make sense. Stores of value outside the reach of the state is highly desirable. The ability to transmit value, trustlessly, anywhere on the planet via a communication channel is a breakthrough technology.

Who wants inflating, dirty, war promoting, state based fiat, when they can have deflating, clean, peace promoting, non-state based cryptocurrency?

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

#189

Post by daveed » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 12:10 AM UTC

csomar wrote: post #144

The discussions around crypto here kind of proves that you cannot use popular opinion in HN to predict the future. People were very negative (and still are) about crypto. Market cap kept proving them wrong year after year and we are here with around $2.6 Trillion and yet people here still think crypto is going to die. It's interesting because in startups, you learn from the first day that you should listen to custome…

> Most of the world suffers from hyper-inflation at worst and inflation at best. Not everyone lives in the USA/Europe and has access to good banking and investment options.

Real question - you mention earlier to "follow the demand". Is there evidence that demand for crypto is coming from countries with unstable banking?

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

#190

Post by spiralx » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 12:46 AM UTC

rip_netrunner wrote: post #176

spiralx wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I'm aware CBDCs are a largely theoretical concept right now, do you have any links to an implementation such as you're describing? No videos please, I don't watch them.

A cursory google search on your part would have easily turned up web pages like these from the central bank of Canada: https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2020/02/contingency-planning-cen... https://www.bankofcanada.ca/research/digital-currencies-and-...

Yes, I'm aware that they're an area of research in many countries, I was talking about actual projects that represent the "endgame of tyranny" as described above. The paper you've linked to talks about privacy and universal accessibility as core goals and I'm not sure whereabouts in this overview the tyranny is outlined - I'm sure you've read it and can point it out?