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Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

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191–200 of 218 posts

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

#191
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 f…

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

What? security services can only spy on money, but just can’t do their main job of preventing attacks by humans?

Maybe we should hire a competent replacement for that job then.

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

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do Germans or Italians want different anti-money laundering standards, for example? Yes. Germany is the highest user of cash in G-7 and has radically different views on privacy from other G-7/G-20 country, doesn't even have a centralized citizen register. They have very little in common with Italy on many aspects, and certainly standards would vary as well. But what does it matter? You think supra-national organiza…

Show me the survey on AML, please. Edit: German citizens are all properly in registers, more local, but very registered nonetheless. You need to have government ID by law. Plus there is a national tax ID.

Do tell: how do you think these standards are established? By performing surveys or some other democratic/rule of law/other ritual?

FATF is an unelected, undemocratic body, where you have absolute monarchies like Saudi Arabia and authoritarian states like Russia audit the free/democratic/morebuzzwords West.

I can only imagine you think voting matters too.

It doesn’t, never did.

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

#193
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".

Yes, and that middle ground is the public blockchain. The transactions are visible but the identities of the endpoints are not. That leaves discovery of those identities up to the investigatory bodies following due process, whether through forensic blockchain or other methods. The blockchain is public but anonymous.

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

#194
>28 May 2022 - Huw van Steenis

  Co-chair, Global Future Council on Responsive Financial Systems, The World Economic Forum
"The Future of Finance" - Davos 2022 : https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/05/what-i-learned-davos2...

-- >The penny has dropped,

  That without regulation [crypto] can’t inject the trust and stability which a financial system at scale needs.
— Huw van Steenis.

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

#195
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody likes homelessness, but do people care about it enough to vote for people with an agenda for it or pay for it to change? And no, technologies do not freely diffuse through societies, some stuff remains pretty firmly in highly policed boxes when the cost of letting it run free is deemed to high (can you just go buy nuclear weapons, for example?). Who is to say that the cost of banning crypto would be too high -…

> ...do people care about it enough to vote for people with an agenda for it... Yep. Happens regularly. > ...or pay for it to change? And nope, certainly not. But crypto will fall into the same category - stamping out the ability to do the - rather simple - necessary maths would require horrific compromises that are simply not supportable. This technology has radically altered the power balance of moving funds around…

I don't think asset freezes are high on most people's agenda in first world countries. And the developing world does not have the GDP to move how things are done in the large economies for now.

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

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't think the system works, fix it. It is actually possible in a democracy, thankfully. Techno solutions do not solve the underlying human factor problems.

> If you don't think the system works, fix it Hence Bitcoin.

Reply that next time I ask "make up an entirely new system with the same human factor problems but now rogue actors acting with impunity, no oversight and fewer avenues to democratically influence them" rather than "fix it"

If you live in a democratic country, you actually have ways of fixing it. And no, you don't need to give up your freedom for blockchain panopticon in the process.

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

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you don't think the system works, fix it Hence Bitcoin.

Reply that next time I ask "make up an entirely new system with the same human factor problems but now rogue actors acting with impunity, no oversight and fewer avenues to democratically influence them" rather than "fix it" If you live in a democratic country, you actually have ways of fixing it. And no, you don't need to give up your freedom for blockchain panopticon in the process.

>If you live in a democratic country, you actually have ways of fixing it

You still haven't told me in what fantasy land you live where that is actually possible.

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

#199
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 we…

> This is the very definition of a shallow dismissal Short and succinct is not the same as shallow. > 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. I’m not insinuating anything, I’m explicitly saying that is the case. > 1) the arguments against crypto are specific to crypto “Cryp…

Who are you trying to fool with this? All web3 and cryptocurrency projects trace their lineage back to the Bitcoin paper, and they include or interface with some permutation on a blockchain modelled totally or substantially on Bitcoin's blockchain. Projects of that nature fall under the term crypto. Pretty sure you could figure that out just from the Super Bowl commercials.

Critics of crypto are almost always objecting to its use as a financial instrument, or as a way to technologically convert social relations into markets (as in the case of "play-to-earn" games turning MMO guilds into a peasant-lord economic relation, fun fun fun). There are already substantial, standing arguments against all of the meaningful permutations/additions to the blockchain technology (NFTs, DAOs, stablecoins, proof of stake...).

These arguments are not necessary because in practice every crypto project to date has been a scam, an inefficient implementation of something that already exists (either slower, more wasteful, or not fixing any of the problems that it points out in its traditional equivalent), or is just an unregulated security. The self-proclaimed geniuses that develop crypto projects have spent the last decade rediscovering all of the pitfalls that led to the present-day financial system they so badly want to disrupt, and losing gullible people's money doing it.

The core of crypto, in my opinion and explicitly in Bitcoin, is "trustless money" but crypto is only trustless in the abstract. We have to have trust that the developers of our coin didn't make any mistakes. We have to trust that the coin will not just fork if a rich guy loses money (like Ethereum did in the 2016 DAO attack).

If we want to build something complicated we have to trust that the smart contract developers are not malicious and made no mistakes. Obvious counter to this is that they are open source, but we're not talking about trustless money for programmers. Some will say that "the market" will figure out who to trust through adoption but in empirical reality this has not been the case.

I am not an economist, but basic observation also tells us that an asset that fluctuates as wildly as Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is also not good as a currency. Transaction are also slow and expensive, and any crypto project that purports to solve this problem may want to check out a similar little technology called "Visa".

We can hate the way central banking is done, but developers really need to come to terms with the fact that we have had far too many technological fixes for social problems. Many crypto projects promise many things, but I ultimately trust a central, predictable authority (even if it's corrupt) more than some guy operating in a field that, time and time again, just takes peoples money and runs.

I want to see crypto remain 100% legal but get taxed fairly, because everyone who is pretending it's the future will immediately liquidate their assets and leave.

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

#200
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"One of the hallmarks of mania is the rapid rise in complexity and rates of fraud"

wasn't early internet a massive rise in complexity? and it came with a ton of fraud too?

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