If they kill crypto, we will always still have barter.
If they kill barter, then we've got serious problems.
U.S. Senate Vote in Favor of Amendment That Threatens Crypto Industry
71–80 of 174 posts
Re: U.S. Senate Vote in Favor of Amendment That Threatens Crypto Industry
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not OP, but the absence of AML/KYC appears to be (very explicitly) one of their points against cryptocurrencies.
From a proponent's perspective that's a big point in favour of cryptocurrencies. AML has been completely ineffective; there's absolutely zero evidence to show it's reduced drug usage or terrorism, drug gangs now are richer than ever before. What it has been effective at is making banking and achieving financial privacy way harder for the average individual. AML is like the war on drugs: it makes normal people's lives…
Cryptocurrency is also a hedge against tyranny. There seems to be a naive belief that it can never happen here, just because it never has.
Re: U.S. Senate Vote in Favor of Amendment That Threatens Crypto Industry
#73I've been following this discussion in Washington and on Hacker News. I'm moderately anti-crypto--I don't buy the pitch but am open to being wrong and believe folks should be free to do what they want with it. I've also been struck by the proliferation of bank-like services without bank-like obligations. This stretches from fractional-reserve and maturity-transforming services like Tether to exchanges/dealers like Bi…
But the power and potential disruption of cryptocurrency is the anonymity. It's the benefits of cash brought to the digital world. I understand the dangers of the criminal element, but underground economies benefit oppressed people when governments turn tyrannical. If you're response to that is only that "it can't happen here", I don't know what to say. They can and do happen faster than anyone realizes. And they are…
> But the power and potential disruption of cryptocurrency is the anonymity.
Depends on the ones you use. Certainly the privacy coins like Monero are the ones that do better than most of the other coins out there.
Re: U.S. Senate Vote in Favor of Amendment That Threatens Crypto Industry
#74Hey, the crypto industry has Ted Cruz in its corner, so that's, uh, okay, well, never mind.
Re: U.S. Senate Vote in Favor of Amendment That Threatens Crypto Industry
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
From a proponent's perspective that's a big point in favour of cryptocurrencies. AML has been completely ineffective; there's absolutely zero evidence to show it's reduced drug usage or terrorism, drug gangs now are richer than ever before. What it has been effective at is making banking and achieving financial privacy way harder for the average individual. AML is like the war on drugs: it makes normal people's lives…
Cryptocurrency is also a hedge against tyranny. There seems to be a naive belief that it can never happen here, just because it never has.
>There seems to be a naive belief that it can never happen here, just because it never has.
What do you mean it never has? FDR literally stole everybody's gold in 1933 and got away with it.
Re: U.S. Senate Vote in Favor of Amendment That Threatens Crypto Industry
#76I've been following this discussion in Washington and on Hacker News. I'm moderately anti-crypto--I don't buy the pitch but am open to being wrong and believe folks should be free to do what they want with it. I've also been struck by the proliferation of bank-like services without bank-like obligations. This stretches from fractional-reserve and maturity-transforming services like Tether to exchanges/dealers like Bi…
But the power and potential disruption of cryptocurrency is the anonymity. It's the benefits of cash brought to the digital world. I understand the dangers of the criminal element, but underground economies benefit oppressed people when governments turn tyrannical. If you're response to that is only that "it can't happen here", I don't know what to say. They can and do happen faster than anyone realizes. And they are…
> underground economies benefit oppressed people when governments turn tyrannical
They also benefit the rich and powerful by enabling tax evasion and graft. Pyongyang, Tehran and Caracas make regular use of illicit trade and money laundering to facilitate upward wealth transfer.
Yours is a legitimate point. It's an argument for curtailing the power of law and government. That's fine. We can debate that. But until America decides it doesn't want to collect taxes anymore, the reporting is sort of required.
Re: U.S. Senate Vote in Favor of Amendment That Threatens Crypto Industry
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, and I hate that people shorten cryptocurrency to crypto.
The term “derivatives” is widely used for financial derivatives like options and swaps. It’s gained such widespread adoption that it by far dwarfs the original meaning of the instantaneous rate of change in calculus. I think the simpler answer is that when a word has two meanings, one a widely used category of financial instruments and the other a narrowly defined branch of advanced mathematics, the former will almos…
Cryptography is more widely used than cryptocurrency. That people don't understand they're using it doesn't change the fact that "threatens the cryptography industry" is more scary than "threatens the cryptocurrency industry" especially since cryptocurrency relies on cryptography so it would be directly threatened as a consequence.
Re: U.S. Senate Vote in Favor of Amendment That Threatens Crypto Industry
#78As someone who has been sorely disappointed by much of how crypto has developed since it's early days and is somewhat a crypto pessimist, I'm extremely disturbed that something which could outright kill US Crypto is being rammed into a infrastructure spending bill. If you want to ban crypto, fine, that's a position which could be taken, debated, and discussed. But it should be done separately and given sufficient time for public feedback. Stuffing it into this bill is asinine to the nth degree.
Re: U.S. Senate Vote in Favor of Amendment That Threatens Crypto Industry
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not OP, but the absence of AML/KYC appears to be (very explicitly) one of their points against cryptocurrencies.
From a proponent's perspective that's a big point in favour of cryptocurrencies. AML has been completely ineffective; there's absolutely zero evidence to show it's reduced drug usage or terrorism, drug gangs now are richer than ever before. What it has been effective at is making banking and achieving financial privacy way harder for the average individual. AML is like the war on drugs: it makes normal people's lives…
> AML has been completely ineffective; there's absolutely zero evidence to show it's reduced drug usage or terrorism, drug gangs now are richer than ever before.
AML is not itself an anti-drug-trafficking or anti-terrorism law. It’s a law designed to make money laundering more difficult by requiring banks to keep and submit more information on large transactions. Normal American citizens also launder and embezzle money, and AML laws have arguably been pretty effective against the baseline petty financial crime that defined American upper class finance during the previous century.
Besides, the assertion that drug traffickers are “richer than before” needs substantiation and clarification. They can be “richer” than before in terms of cash on hand (particularly outside of USD), but it doesn’t mean all that much if they can’t wash it back into legitimate looking finances. But I don’t even necessarily believe that first half.
Finally, AML is a set of US laws. If you want to claim that the US is an authoritarian government, go ahead; just don’t contort your argument through some abstract Bad Guy. They don’t have access to your bank records.
Re: U.S. Senate Vote in Favor of Amendment That Threatens Crypto Industry
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not OP, but the absence of AML/KYC appears to be (very explicitly) one of their points against cryptocurrencies.
From a proponent's perspective that's a big point in favour of cryptocurrencies. AML has been completely ineffective; there's absolutely zero evidence to show it's reduced drug usage or terrorism, drug gangs now are richer than ever before. What it has been effective at is making banking and achieving financial privacy way harder for the average individual. AML is like the war on drugs: it makes normal people's lives…
To that same argument, saying there is no evidence that it has reduced black market behavior is the exact same concept that would drive 'There's no evidence that it hasn't reduced bad actors".
AML isn't like the war on drugs because that's a silly pointless war, it's more like traffic laws. Are they still broken? All of the time.
Would you rather drive on roads without them?
It's that simple, AML makes the job harder to do which is known to be effective at making harder to do, or at least introduces fear of doing.