I’m firmly of the belief that Bitcoin (and it’s ilk) should be illegal. There’s many reasons for it - Sometimes because it’s an unregistered security, sometimes

I’m firmly of the belief that Bitcoin (and it’s ilk) should be illegal. There’s many reasons for it - Sometimes because it’s an unregistered security, sometimes because it falls afoul of laws against paying people in scrip, sometimes because it’s outright fraud. There’s real uses for Merkel trees in finance - Cryptographically secure history is valuable. I’ve yet to see any problems that blockchains solve that merkel trees do not[1]. Finance and interchange works just fine with just Git - Interchange done via simple published balancesheets with countersignatures by both parties, then merged into “head” on the regular by any form of rollup. It doesn’t have the (well overstated) pseudonymity advantages of bitcoin, and that’s a feature in a well regulated financial market. [1] With one ridiculous exception: In Iain Bank’s “Excession”, a mothballed war-fleet is resurrected by a traitor who presents enough cryptographic signatures of coconspirators to burn the keys of the real C+C chain. Blockchain would make this much harder - But not necessarily enough harder, even if they had to effectively recreate the military history of an entire total-peace (through superior firepower) civilization.