14 ms·

Cryptocurrency is driving innovation in the financial sector

88 points by newman8r 8y ago

kylebenzle 8y ago
We are switching, from paper, declared by fiat to be "money" to a digital decentralized ledger, it is just that simple. Get caught holding the last of the paper stuff just one day longer than the next greatest fool and you will be sorry. SWIFT knows this, governments know this and now the legacy financial industry (5 years too late) is starting to get it too.
- branchless 8y ago
  You can't pay federal taxes in non-sovereign and they'll never give it up.
- foepys 8y ago
  This "digital decentralized ledger" you are talking about is ever-growing. To be able to handle its size and keep its integrity, special entities have to keep it running for the layman to use. Nobody can carry terabytes of "blockchain" around all the time. These special entities need to record all transactions and verify them against this ledger. As a result you are now even more dependent on these entities than ever before. You basically just re-invented banking, only in a bad, uncontrollable way that is prone to takeovers (51% attack) by anonymous actors.
  - haolez 8y ago
    You must come from a country where the central bank doesn't print money :)
    - Nursie 8y ago
      I come from a country where the central bank can issue money (not print it, that's someone else's job). It's great. They can use their powers to keep inflation at a small positive level, help smooth out economic bumps, and help the money supply keep pace with the economy. A fixed amount, ever, would constrain economic growth, reward hoarders rather than investors, disincentivise spending and generally be a poor substitute. As evidence I present ... the entirety of the Western world and it's multiple decades of unparalleled prosperity.
      - gthaman 8y ago
        Central banking is awful and you know no better than to say what you say (having not known anything else). Evil triumphs only when good men do nothing!
        Nursie 8y ago
        You've provided no evidence or argument as to why central banking might be 'awful', after I just explained why there is much to be liked about it. Please do provide your reasons, but if they're just the usual libertarian tripe about inflation and taxes, I'm afraid I might not give them much credence.
  - ric2b 8y ago
    > To be able to handle its size and keep its integrity, special entities have to keep it running for the layman to use. Nobody can carry terabytes of "blockchain" around all the time. (...) As a result you are now even more dependent on these entities than ever before. And yet here I am verifying the entire Bitcoin blockchain on an old crappy Toshiba netbook with a normal Internet connection and an old hard-drive. I use this one weird trick and big entities hate me: I have my node configured to prune already verified blocks, it only needs about 20GB of disk to store the last few months. By the way, if you want to archive it all, a 1TB HDD can store roughly 10 years of completely full 2MB blocks. You can get one of those for less than $40, or $4/year.
- jostmey 8y ago
  Not really. If a country switches to pure digital money to it wil peg the value to its paper money and allow citizens to trade paper money for digital currency
- henrikschroder 8y ago
  > We are switching, from paper, declared by fiat to be "money" to a digital decentralized ledger ...that is also declared "money" by fiat, exactly the same as paper money. It has value because we say it has value. That's not the interesting property. The interesting property of cryptocurrencies is that the supply of money is constricted and can't be manipulated by any nation's central bank.
  - colossal 8y ago
    > The interesting property of cryptocurrencies is that the supply of money is constricted and can't be manipulated by any nation's central bank. I don't understand how people believe this is a good thing (not implying you do specifically). One of the leading factors in the economic recovery following the 2008 crisis was Quantitative Easing and expansionary policies by the fed. Without these tools at the government's disposal, if there was another credit crisis, the effects would almost certainly be much worse and prolonged. Like any tool, sure, it can be abused. But getting rid of it entirely by switching to a decentralized ledger (ignoring the reality that total decentralization seems infeasible), eliminates the very tangible benefits of having a central bank.
    - henrikschroder 8y ago
      > I don't understand how people believe this is a good thing (not implying you do specifically). It's probably the same people who think that the Gold Standard was a fantastic thing and abandoning it was the worst thing ever.
    - tekproxy 8y ago
      I think the effects would have been worse in the short term, but the long term effect is much worse -- signaling to an industry that wanton risk taking will essentially be rewarded and if you're large and connected enough the government will debase the currency to keep you in business, so you're free to fuck up again. I think you're arguing on the side of "countries need monarchies because the people can't be trusted" and "printing presses allow seditious ideas to spread and must be outlawed or tightly controlled", but, again, I can't be certain. How is it that we can have two totally different interpretations of the truth? Isn't economics a science? Why is it that there are such varying opinions? I think it's because economies are too complex for any one person to accurately model. What you need is markets to decide what works and what's valuable and what the prices should be. What you need is competition, and that's what cryptocurrencies provide. Bitcoin is already competing with weak currencies of corrupt governments and winning. A lot of improvements need to be made before Bitcoin is anywhere close to making a run for the #1 currency in the world, but if you're watching the technology closely, there's still a lot happening in crypto and it might be sooner than you think.
- lettergram 8y ago
  It may be true that a digital decentralized ledger will be used, but in the end, the government will still run the ledger. Banks aren't going to be hurt at all by this, and I don't think paper is going anywhere anytime soon; of course, governments do want it to go away..
  - lostctown 8y ago
    While it may be a ledger that utilizes cryptographic primitives, it is no longer decentralized if run by the government. While I disagree with the idea that base protocols like bitcoin or ethereum make for sound money, I think it's likely that some decentralized stable asset takes the place of existing fiat.
    - XorNot 8y ago
      Why? Or more accurately, how? My government denominates my tax obligations in my government's currency. This includes taxes based on transactions of non-currency goods. So there's always demand for my local currency so long as my government exists. What demand is there for a decentralised digital currency? What motivates stable demand for it compared to the currency I can pay my taxes in and which my employer can be legally compelled by the courts to settle debts to me in?
    - colossal 8y ago
      Can you explain to me how to solve the decentralization problem then? It seems that with the current generation of blockchain, the problem is that eventually it will become no longer feasible to store the entire ledger on one device, and therefore some level of centralization will be required in order to keep the system functional. Throw in the enormous amount of (ever increasing) energy required for proof-of-work systems like bitcoin, and it seems unlikely that true decentralization is possible with current technology.
      - PretzelPirate 8y ago
        Storing the entire blockchain isn’t as important as having check point blocks that are agreed upon via consensus. At that point, you can prune the historical blockchain state and new nodes can sync from multiple nodes to get the latest state, starting with the most recent checkpoint. With things like state receipts, light clients can rely on other network nodes to provide the state of transactions that were recently confirmed, without giving up security. This does require that some nodes are processing and storing the most recent N blocks and their transactions. Today, non-mining full nodes do this for free out of kindness, but in the future, this could be offered as a paid service instead. Proof of work is only one option for securing a chain. Research into proof of stake and delegated proof of stake will hopefully make PoW a thing of the past and drastically reduce the energy requirements to secure a blockchain. The Ethereum team has two main focuses right now: 1. Proof of Stkae transition (Casper) 2. Implementing sharding At the same time, teams are working on sidechain technology such as Plasma, Plasma Cash, and Loom which will essentially allow transactions to happen on another blockchain whose state is persisted in the root chain. This not only benefits blockchain users (higher scalability, little to no fees), but is also good for the blockchain network since the data persisted to the main chain is only a set of merkle roots from the sidechain, no matter how many transactions the sidechain has.
- eksemplar 8y ago
  I have an app that lets me transfer money to stores, friends, whatever instantly and without a fee. It’s build by our largest bank but works any bank. In stores it functions like apple or google pay. If it gets hacked I get my money back. Basically it does everything cryptos promised to do, except it actually works and it’s centralized. Mean while I have a few cryptos sitting in a wallet with no real way of turning them into anything because nobody accepts them and no services currently let me turn them into fiat in my country. It’s been 9 years and I think we’re further away from seeing a decentralized currency than we were 8 years ago. Back then you could at least buy coffee with BTC, you can’t even do that anymore. I do think crypto helped the financial industry step up. We wouldn’t have had our bank app if there hadn’t been competition, but I don’t see us ever moving to a decentralized economy.
- GenericsMotors 8y ago
  Most "paper" money is already digital, IIRC only something like 10% exists in physical form as bank notes and metal coins. And which decentralized ledger would this be? Bitcoin, with its maximum of 7 TX/sec? Before you come back with the "but LightningNetwork will fix that!" argument, please do a back of the envelope calculation of how long it would take 1 billion people to open just one channel on the LN, and let that sink in...
henrikschroder 8y ago
There's absolutely zero evidence for the headline in the actual bulk of the article. SWIFT launched a new service last year, that is now handling 25% of all cross-border transactions, to the tune of 100 billion USD per day. Meanwhile, Bitcoin peaked last year at a total trading volume of 5 billion USD per day, and is now doing less than 1 billion per day. How much of that is cross-border is unknown, but even assuming 100%, it's still a tiny fraction of what SWIFT is handling. Extrapolating from that that cryptocurrencies somehow drove SWIFT to launch their new service is a bit of a stretch to put it mildly.
- buckie 8y ago
  SWITH gpi was announced in 2015, piloted in 2016, and incorporated a blockchain PoC in 2017[1]. While only SWIFT knows if cryptocurrency was part of the conversation at the start, I'd be surprised if it didn't at least come up very early on. In the context of how the politics of upgrading a bank's stack work, "driving" is the wrong word because in that context there are always people trying to drive "innovation". A better word is tailwind. Generally, banking tech is pretty crappy and good technologist can easily spot places where a big upgrade (aka "innovation") is warranted. The problem these people run into when lobbying for the upgrade is overcoming the hurdle of migration risk. The bigger the project, the bigger the hurdle. For JPM, I've heard this hurdle was summed up as _demonstrate a 1000x return on investment_. Blockchain (via cryptocurrency) provides a tailwind to the people already trying to drive "innovation" in 2 ways -- it gives these people two additional angles: 1. As much as banks dislike spending money they hate losing market share. The risk blockchain poses helps in the lobbying for "innovation" without being a central point. 2. Higher ups can have the opportunity to be seen as "innovative in blockchain" by having the main "innovation" have a pet blockchain PoC on the side (similar to [1]) that's only kinda taken seriously. While the first bite at the apple (the upgrade) may not be enough this second bite (PR about them using blockchain) may satisfy them. Does blockchain/cryptocurrency actually drive the discussion or make it into the final "innovation"? Probably not... today's gen 2 stacks just aren't good enough. Hopefully some gen 3's can change this in the next few years but that market still needs to be proven[2]. In the meantime, when dealing with a big bank's bureaucracy, every extra knot of tailwind helps. [1]: https://www.swift.com/news-events/press-releases/22-additional-global-banks-join-the-swift-gpi-blockchain-proof-of-concept https://www.swift.com/news-events/press-releases/22-addition... [2]: Disclosure: I was at JPM working on blockchain back when Gemini (now called Quorum) was first purposed and when Juno was the headline JPM blockchain project. I left to co-found one of these next-gen platforms: kadena.io
bbimbop 8y ago
"Ethan M. Penn" deserves some e-gold for this piece. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold
- lsc 8y ago
  Lol. I personally didn't get on the bitcoin wagon 'cause I had (well, I guess still have) frozen e-gold. Not that I speculated in it, but I accepted some as payment for services back in the day and never got around to cashing it out for money. I am really surprised that people seem to think that the less-centralized nature of bitcoin makes it that much more resistant to government interference; But what do I know? I think bitcoin has lasted a lot longer than e-gold, and has gained a lot more legitimacy. I do find it really curious that so many in the bitcoin community either haven't heard of e-gold or don't see the parallels. I mean, I am also a huge Stephenson fan, and had read "Cryptonomicon" and the idea sounded really cool, but I never really had anything I wanted to buy with e-gold, so other than allowing me to have customers who couldn't get credit, it was not particularly useful. (By the way, is there a "Cryptonomicon" of bitcoin? I mean, I guess the idea of nazi gold is way more compelling than some math? but still... "Cryptonomicon" seems to be like exactly the template) But... my loss in the e-gold shutdown (and my relating of e-gold to bitcoin) meant that I was pretty late to start accepting bitcoin, and that when I did, I used bitpay; Which has worked fine, I suppose, but I had people trying to buy with bitcoin fairly early on, and if I had accepted that and sat on it, I'd probably, well, I wouldn't be hugely rich or anything, but it would have been a nice payday. But I suppose that's the standard regret one has for not timing the market when something goes up in value sharply. I'm personally still a long-term bear on bitcoin... but I kinda have a reputation for being a bear on a lot of things that have, uh, apparently inflated values, so who knows.
  - darawk 8y ago
    > I am really surprised that people seem to think that the less-centralized nature of bitcoin makes it that much more resistant to government interference Why? Decentralized systems are sort of the standard way of defeating centralized governments. See: Tor, Guerilla warfare, Lone wolf terrorism, etc..

88 points by newman8r 8y ago

We are switching, from paper, declared by fiat to be "money" to a digital decentralized ledger, it is just that simple. Get caught holding the last of the paper stuff just one day longer than the next greatest fool and you will be sorry. SWIFT knows this, governments know this and now the legacy financial industry (5 years too late) is starting to get it too.

branchless 8y ago
You can't pay federal taxes in non-sovereign and they'll never give it up.
foepys 8y ago
This "digital decentralized ledger" you are talking about is ever-growing. To be able to handle its size and keep its integrity, special entities have to keep it running for the layman to use. Nobody can carry terabytes of "blockchain" around all the time. These special entities need to record all transactions and verify them against this ledger. As a result you are now even more dependent on these entities than ever before. You basically just re-invented banking, only in a bad, uncontrollable way that is prone to takeovers (51% attack) by anonymous actors.
- haolez 8y ago
  You must come from a country where the central bank doesn't print money :)
  - Nursie 8y ago
    I come from a country where the central bank can issue money (not print it, that's someone else's job). It's great. They can use their powers to keep inflation at a small positive level, help smooth out economic bumps, and help the money supply keep pace with the economy. A fixed amount, ever, would constrain economic growth, reward hoarders rather than investors, disincentivise spending and generally be a poor substitute. As evidence I present ... the entirety of the Western world and it's multiple decades of unparalleled prosperity.
    - gthaman 8y ago
      Central banking is awful and you know no better than to say what you say (having not known anything else). Evil triumphs only when good men do nothing!
      - Nursie 8y ago
        You've provided no evidence or argument as to why central banking might be 'awful', after I just explained why there is much to be liked about it. Please do provide your reasons, but if they're just the usual libertarian tripe about inflation and taxes, I'm afraid I might not give them much credence.
- ric2b 8y ago
  > To be able to handle its size and keep its integrity, special entities have to keep it running for the layman to use. Nobody can carry terabytes of "blockchain" around all the time. (...) As a result you are now even more dependent on these entities than ever before. And yet here I am verifying the entire Bitcoin blockchain on an old crappy Toshiba netbook with a normal Internet connection and an old hard-drive. I use this one weird trick and big entities hate me: I have my node configured to prune already verified blocks, it only needs about 20GB of disk to store the last few months. By the way, if you want to archive it all, a 1TB HDD can store roughly 10 years of completely full 2MB blocks. You can get one of those for less than $40, or $4/year.
jostmey 8y ago
Not really. If a country switches to pure digital money to it wil peg the value to its paper money and allow citizens to trade paper money for digital currency
henrikschroder 8y ago
> We are switching, from paper, declared by fiat to be "money" to a digital decentralized ledger ...that is also declared "money" by fiat, exactly the same as paper money. It has value because we say it has value. That's not the interesting property. The interesting property of cryptocurrencies is that the supply of money is constricted and can't be manipulated by any nation's central bank.
- colossal 8y ago
  > The interesting property of cryptocurrencies is that the supply of money is constricted and can't be manipulated by any nation's central bank. I don't understand how people believe this is a good thing (not implying you do specifically). One of the leading factors in the economic recovery following the 2008 crisis was Quantitative Easing and expansionary policies by the fed. Without these tools at the government's disposal, if there was another credit crisis, the effects would almost certainly be much worse and prolonged. Like any tool, sure, it can be abused. But getting rid of it entirely by switching to a decentralized ledger (ignoring the reality that total decentralization seems infeasible), eliminates the very tangible benefits of having a central bank.
  - henrikschroder 8y ago
    > I don't understand how people believe this is a good thing (not implying you do specifically). It's probably the same people who think that the Gold Standard was a fantastic thing and abandoning it was the worst thing ever.
  - tekproxy 8y ago
    I think the effects would have been worse in the short term, but the long term effect is much worse -- signaling to an industry that wanton risk taking will essentially be rewarded and if you're large and connected enough the government will debase the currency to keep you in business, so you're free to fuck up again. I think you're arguing on the side of "countries need monarchies because the people can't be trusted" and "printing presses allow seditious ideas to spread and must be outlawed or tightly controlled", but, again, I can't be certain. How is it that we can have two totally different interpretations of the truth? Isn't economics a science? Why is it that there are such varying opinions? I think it's because economies are too complex for any one person to accurately model. What you need is markets to decide what works and what's valuable and what the prices should be. What you need is competition, and that's what cryptocurrencies provide. Bitcoin is already competing with weak currencies of corrupt governments and winning. A lot of improvements need to be made before Bitcoin is anywhere close to making a run for the #1 currency in the world, but if you're watching the technology closely, there's still a lot happening in crypto and it might be sooner than you think.
lettergram 8y ago
It may be true that a digital decentralized ledger will be used, but in the end, the government will still run the ledger. Banks aren't going to be hurt at all by this, and I don't think paper is going anywhere anytime soon; of course, governments do want it to go away..
- lostctown 8y ago
  While it may be a ledger that utilizes cryptographic primitives, it is no longer decentralized if run by the government. While I disagree with the idea that base protocols like bitcoin or ethereum make for sound money, I think it's likely that some decentralized stable asset takes the place of existing fiat.
  - XorNot 8y ago
    Why? Or more accurately, how? My government denominates my tax obligations in my government's currency. This includes taxes based on transactions of non-currency goods. So there's always demand for my local currency so long as my government exists. What demand is there for a decentralised digital currency? What motivates stable demand for it compared to the currency I can pay my taxes in and which my employer can be legally compelled by the courts to settle debts to me in?
  - colossal 8y ago
    Can you explain to me how to solve the decentralization problem then? It seems that with the current generation of blockchain, the problem is that eventually it will become no longer feasible to store the entire ledger on one device, and therefore some level of centralization will be required in order to keep the system functional. Throw in the enormous amount of (ever increasing) energy required for proof-of-work systems like bitcoin, and it seems unlikely that true decentralization is possible with current technology.
    - PretzelPirate 8y ago
      Storing the entire blockchain isn’t as important as having check point blocks that are agreed upon via consensus. At that point, you can prune the historical blockchain state and new nodes can sync from multiple nodes to get the latest state, starting with the most recent checkpoint. With things like state receipts, light clients can rely on other network nodes to provide the state of transactions that were recently confirmed, without giving up security. This does require that some nodes are processing and storing the most recent N blocks and their transactions. Today, non-mining full nodes do this for free out of kindness, but in the future, this could be offered as a paid service instead. Proof of work is only one option for securing a chain. Research into proof of stake and delegated proof of stake will hopefully make PoW a thing of the past and drastically reduce the energy requirements to secure a blockchain. The Ethereum team has two main focuses right now: 1. Proof of Stkae transition (Casper) 2. Implementing sharding At the same time, teams are working on sidechain technology such as Plasma, Plasma Cash, and Loom which will essentially allow transactions to happen on another blockchain whose state is persisted in the root chain. This not only benefits blockchain users (higher scalability, little to no fees), but is also good for the blockchain network since the data persisted to the main chain is only a set of merkle roots from the sidechain, no matter how many transactions the sidechain has.
eksemplar 8y ago
I have an app that lets me transfer money to stores, friends, whatever instantly and without a fee. It’s build by our largest bank but works any bank. In stores it functions like apple or google pay. If it gets hacked I get my money back. Basically it does everything cryptos promised to do, except it actually works and it’s centralized. Mean while I have a few cryptos sitting in a wallet with no real way of turning them into anything because nobody accepts them and no services currently let me turn them into fiat in my country. It’s been 9 years and I think we’re further away from seeing a decentralized currency than we were 8 years ago. Back then you could at least buy coffee with BTC, you can’t even do that anymore. I do think crypto helped the financial industry step up. We wouldn’t have had our bank app if there hadn’t been competition, but I don’t see us ever moving to a decentralized economy.
GenericsMotors 8y ago
Most "paper" money is already digital, IIRC only something like 10% exists in physical form as bank notes and metal coins. And which decentralized ledger would this be? Bitcoin, with its maximum of 7 TX/sec? Before you come back with the "but LightningNetwork will fix that!" argument, please do a back of the envelope calculation of how long it would take 1 billion people to open just one channel on the LN, and let that sink in...

henrikschroder 8y ago

There's absolutely zero evidence for the headline in the actual bulk of the article. SWIFT launched a new service last year, that is now handling 25% of all cross-border transactions, to the tune of 100 billion USD per day. Meanwhile, Bitcoin peaked last year at a total trading volume of 5 billion USD per day, and is now doing less than 1 billion per day. How much of that is cross-border is unknown, but even assuming 100%, it's still a tiny fraction of what SWIFT is handling. Extrapolating from that that cryptocurrencies somehow drove SWIFT to launch their new service is a bit of a stretch to put it mildly.

buckie 8y ago
SWITH gpi was announced in 2015, piloted in 2016, and incorporated a blockchain PoC in 2017[1]. While only SWIFT knows if cryptocurrency was part of the conversation at the start, I'd be surprised if it didn't at least come up very early on. In the context of how the politics of upgrading a bank's stack work, "driving" is the wrong word because in that context there are always people trying to drive "innovation". A better word is tailwind. Generally, banking tech is pretty crappy and good technologist can easily spot places where a big upgrade (aka "innovation") is warranted. The problem these people run into when lobbying for the upgrade is overcoming the hurdle of migration risk. The bigger the project, the bigger the hurdle. For JPM, I've heard this hurdle was summed up as _demonstrate a 1000x return on investment_. Blockchain (via cryptocurrency) provides a tailwind to the people already trying to drive "innovation" in 2 ways -- it gives these people two additional angles: 1. As much as banks dislike spending money they hate losing market share. The risk blockchain poses helps in the lobbying for "innovation" without being a central point. 2. Higher ups can have the opportunity to be seen as "innovative in blockchain" by having the main "innovation" have a pet blockchain PoC on the side (similar to [1]) that's only kinda taken seriously. While the first bite at the apple (the upgrade) may not be enough this second bite (PR about them using blockchain) may satisfy them. Does blockchain/cryptocurrency actually drive the discussion or make it into the final "innovation"? Probably not... today's gen 2 stacks just aren't good enough. Hopefully some gen 3's can change this in the next few years but that market still needs to be proven[2]. In the meantime, when dealing with a big bank's bureaucracy, every extra knot of tailwind helps. [1]: https://www.swift.com/news-events/press-releases/22-additional-global-banks-join-the-swift-gpi-blockchain-proof-of-concept https://www.swift.com/news-events/press-releases/22-addition... [2]: Disclosure: I was at JPM working on blockchain back when Gemini (now called Quorum) was first purposed and when Juno was the headline JPM blockchain project. I left to co-found one of these next-gen platforms: kadena.io

bbimbop 8y ago

"Ethan M. Penn" deserves some e-gold for this piece. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold

lsc 8y ago
Lol. I personally didn't get on the bitcoin wagon 'cause I had (well, I guess still have) frozen e-gold. Not that I speculated in it, but I accepted some as payment for services back in the day and never got around to cashing it out for money. I am really surprised that people seem to think that the less-centralized nature of bitcoin makes it that much more resistant to government interference; But what do I know? I think bitcoin has lasted a lot longer than e-gold, and has gained a lot more legitimacy. I do find it really curious that so many in the bitcoin community either haven't heard of e-gold or don't see the parallels. I mean, I am also a huge Stephenson fan, and had read "Cryptonomicon" and the idea sounded really cool, but I never really had anything I wanted to buy with e-gold, so other than allowing me to have customers who couldn't get credit, it was not particularly useful. (By the way, is there a "Cryptonomicon" of bitcoin? I mean, I guess the idea of nazi gold is way more compelling than some math? but still... "Cryptonomicon" seems to be like exactly the template) But... my loss in the e-gold shutdown (and my relating of e-gold to bitcoin) meant that I was pretty late to start accepting bitcoin, and that when I did, I used bitpay; Which has worked fine, I suppose, but I had people trying to buy with bitcoin fairly early on, and if I had accepted that and sat on it, I'd probably, well, I wouldn't be hugely rich or anything, but it would have been a nice payday. But I suppose that's the standard regret one has for not timing the market when something goes up in value sharply. I'm personally still a long-term bear on bitcoin... but I kinda have a reputation for being a bear on a lot of things that have, uh, apparently inflated values, so who knows.
- darawk 8y ago
  > I am really surprised that people seem to think that the less-centralized nature of bitcoin makes it that much more resistant to government interference Why? Decentralized systems are sort of the standard way of defeating centralized governments. See: Tor, Guerilla warfare, Lone wolf terrorism, etc..