We pretending miners and exchanges can't be legislated out of existence at a scale that would render use of said coin virtually impossible? Edit: Apparently someone is, in fact, pretending just that. Nifty.
> We pretending miners and exchanges can't be legislated out of existence
Yes? I am assuming you are either not very technical, or do not know a lot about how cryptocurrencies work.
Disclaimer: I am not a proponent of cryptocurrency, I don't own any cryptocurrency, and I am only arguing the technical issue.
If you're talking about banning the hardware, it's probably possible to essentially stop the production and sale of ASIC miners since they have no other purpose, but that's only one type of hardware. People would still be able to use regular CPUs and GPUs to mine.
If you're talking about completely banning the participation in a blockchain, this would be impossible to detect as long as the traffic is encrypted -- if you constantly look for IP addresses and keep a blocklist up to date, you could essentially null-route them (breaking DNS is not enough).
If you do all of the above, which is a lot of work and already completely untenable to sort out on an international level, you still haven't solved the issue of darknets, like Tor or any similar solution.
Take the Silk Road for example, probably one of the most famous darkweb marketplaces for illicit drugs ever. We can only guess how much money and time the FBI spent building a case, and even when they managed to find him by bending every opsec weakness they could find, they still had to ambush him in a library and catch him with his laptop unlocked.
My point here is that nobody claims darknets will protect you completely, but it raises the bar immensely for the amount of necessary work to catch you. If blockchains (currencies) were made illegal globally, it's a pretty safe bet this would accelerate technology for doing the exact same things as before, just in an anonymized fashion.
Then what? Do you illegalize writing code that facilitates cryptocurrency? Illegalize darknets?
Just saying "make it illegal" is naive. It chooses to ignore the massive violations of our rights that would have to be made to not even succeed, but create the appearance of succeeding.
If you have a concrete proposal on how it would be technically possible to ban miners and exchanges, without also banning encryption and anonymity online, I'm listening.
Sad news friend. I am extremely technical and was mining btc 18 months before Starbucks would let you buy a cup of coffee with it so yeah I know how it works. What modern internet funbux aficionados consistently fail to grasp is there isn't a coin in existence that cannot be trivially decoupled from the larger economy through nothing more complicated than removing market-makers incentives to accept them as value tokens. Go meditate on the xkcd where a crypto geek gets worked over with a wrench for his password until enlightenment is achieved.
anything where mining is inflationary (or at least disinflationary where the rate of inflation outpaces the rate of "lost" coins).
Monero/XMR kind-of-sort-of falls into the second category, with "fresh" coin minting being a part of the mining process, although probably not at a rate that outpaces regular rot/deflation.
the mindset of securities trade, even when they have some external utility, will always be "getting in before it gets big". this is the idea behind essentially all analytical stock trading, yet the NYSE never seems to get called a ponzi scheme.
> saying Free and Open Source Software should be banned
Nobody is proposing banning blockchains. Cryptocurrency, however, is clearly more than just software in the way missile-targeting system is more than ones and zeroes.
> Nobody is proposing banning blockchains. Cryptocurrency, however, is clearly more than just software
The block reward is the incentive for miners/stakers to operate a decentralized network. It is not a separate concept. The actual value of each reward is emergent. It is the result of resources being used to operate the network, and how we value that network. If we don't value the network enough, the value of the block reward will drop below the resources required to maintain it. I don't see why any external party should dictate how we may value that block reward or network.
> the way missile-targeting system is more than ones and zeroes.
This is an irrelevant comparison attempting to moralize software by comparing it to a weapon.
> block reward is the incentive for miners/stakers to operate a decentralized network. It is not a separate concept
The moment that reward becomes a currency, and is traded for U.S. dollars, it leaves the domain of just being software. Banning that is quite different from banning the software per se.
> an irrelevant comparison attempting to moralize software by comparing it to a weapon
Comparing Bitcoin to free software seems similarly disingenuous.
> The moment that reward becomes a currency, and is traded for U.S. dollars, it leaves the domain of just being software. Banning that is quite different from banning the software per se.
That would make Eve online, Second Life, and other games illegal since people trade their digital assets all the time
>Comparing Bitcoin to free software seems similarly disingenuous.
So I create "bullshitCoin2023" and trade it amongst my friends and myself. We also mine it via proof of work. We all work hard to see who can out do each other to mine the most coin with same fixed amount of computational input.
Some guy in Nigeria I don't know starts swapping it for Zimbabwe dollars. Now I'm not writing software anymore?
If your position is that digital assets should be banned, you're a little late for that. Digital assets are defined in the US as property by the IRS since about 2014, and a commodity by the CFTC.
Furthermore, giving someone US dollars for something doesn't make that thing a "currency."
> Comparing Bitcoin to free software seems similarly disingenuous.
Crypto people should just call it a religion and get 1st amendment protections. The general pop already call it a cult anyway.
Wild people think mathematics, cryptography, OSS, and free markets should be banned. No one is forcing anyone to buy/sell/hold crypto. It is completely voluntary.
The downvotes are literally because you built an absurd strawman argument, hung it around my neck, and then tore it down. That’s bad HN etiquette.
A) please point where in my post I even came close to suggesting bitcoin should be banned.
B) even if I had said bitcoin should be banned, did I suggest anywhere that distribution of the software be banned?
For example, let’s accept the extremely problematic premise that I somehow said bitcoin should be banned. What that could mean is that I think the US (and other governments) should regulate any marketplaces that are currency on and off ramps for customers. Stable coins claiming to be backed by US dollars can be banned outright (easy) or that you have to register and the US government establishes an audit process to verify the claimed reserves / the software you’re using to control the stable coins (eg Tether is a highly suspect stable coin that’s likely another huge fraud). The US controls a lot of the world’s banking (not all) but they can also say that those banks aren’t allowed to support such systems and it’s citizens aren’t allowed to engage with unregulated stable coins. Correct me if I’m wrong but that’s an example of something the US could do to regulate / ban the coins without touching the software. That also doesn’t touch distribution of FOSS but places a significantly regulatory burden on the networks themselves. Additionally, by placing sanctions on these coins, the US currency is so ingrained they could theoretically ban coins from most of the western world. Finally, if they wanted to (and there may be national security reasons to not do it), they could also deploy meaningful compute resources to do a nation level attack to further undermine such networks by raising the transaction costs too high or doing 51% attacks (there’s no evidence that these networks are immune to 51% attacks from a nation state like the US). I think you’re really underestimating the power the US could wield to take down the running network (production instance) vs needing to ban the source code (much harder and not worth anyone’s time since I imagine the government learned their lesson with the war in the 90s about cryptography + the free speech implications it has).
So, in summary. You put words in my mouth I never said and then used that to draw the most absurd and weakest possible position from there. That’s the reason for the downvotes. My suggestion is figure out what got in your way of reflecting and figuring out what was wrong with your post (eg maybe in the future before reread the post you’re replying to to make sure they actually said what you think they said and if it’s ambiguous asking questions rather than making an assumption).
Your second edit makes it clear you failed to do that because you kept claiming that any down voters were supporting a position no one claimed around banning distribution of the bitcoin source code (or even binaries) and demanding that they provide support for an absurd position that was only voiced by you in the first place.
> They are downvoting you because your comment is low quality and overly aggressive.
I don't believe that it is. Certainly not to the point where it would be worthy of depromoting. It was a worthy discussion point. It could have easily just been left alone. My edit was highlighting that it was the typical outcome.
> Downvotes and upvotes on HN should reflect the quality of the comment and not agreement/disagreement.
Keyword: "Should"
You must know that it's often not how it works out. I frequently see thoughtful or otherwise harmless comments downvoted. Yet, rude and vapid, anti-crypto comments remain or are boosted. Downvotes are especially common when it's a reply to an older account with lots of internet points. They rule these threads.
EDIT:
I'm not able to reply again because I am disallowed from posting too many times within an unspecified time. Probably also a consequence of not having enough internet points. I've already lost 5 of my precious points so faR!
As the other comment points out, a founder of the site thinks differently than you.
I obviously disagree with you. As PG suggests, I should downvote you to make sure that nobody else has the chance to agree with you. But then HN doesn't allow me to disagree with you, so your comment will remain.
My downvoted comments will also be grayed out to warn others of HN disagreements like a colorful snake that warns against danger. Stay back!
Sure, it does happen. But I think in this case the downvoted comment is obviously going off in a way unwarranted by the comment they are responding to and that tends to get you downvoted even faster than people just disagreeing with you.
> The advancements in AI are as incredible as they are overstated. AI is nowhere near making human coders obsolete.
Already grayed out. No replies. Bottom of all comments at the moment.
Abrassive? Rude? Unwarranted? Let me know what was wrong with that one. Or did multiple people disagree with you? Does it make you want to continue offering your comment on a topic? Seems like people can downvote for any reason they like. Well.. they can if HN bestows that honor on them.
This is how echo chambers form.
Surely you disagree with this comment as well, so feel free to take away more of my internet points.
I can't downvote you as you're replying to me. Not that I would anyway since I'm the one arguing people shouldn't be voting based on agreement or disagreement.
I will, however, stop responding to you because your comments are not constructive.
There wasn’t any cryptocurrency in OneCoin. They didn’t even literally have any cryptocurrency. It was all completely 100% MLM.
That’s different from, say, BitConnect, that was a MLM with some sort of cryptocurrency. Or of course all the “DeFi” that’s MLM but with more steps.
But yeah OneCoin had literally nothing to do with any cryptocurrency. They said they are planning one one day.