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I was mostly ambivalent about crypto - it seemed like a lot of speculation but I liked some scenarios it enabled (mostly scenarios where traditional payment was
by reader_mode 6y ago
I was mostly ambivalent about crypto - it seemed like a lot of speculation but I liked some scenarios it enabled (mostly scenarios where traditional payment was not practical for w/e reason).
But seeing the HW situation, energy burn, scammers, infra hijacking, etc. there are so many negatives I'm more and more in favour of making it illegal.
- loceng 6y agoThe SEC has always been in place supposedly to protect the average citizen from being able to make bad investments - however I don't understand how they dropped the ball so hard with crypto-"currencies;" regulatory capture by VC-finance industrial complex? Is it that they are global and decentralized that made them just not take a stance on them, also the same reason it obviously would easily and quickly gain popularity as a global, decentralized MLM-Ponzi structure?
- tarsinge 6y agoThe problem is what is illegal then? Numbers? Cryptography? Because nobody buy sell or own crypto technically, there just happen to be transactions on a distributed network, with some people knowing private keys to generate new transactions. It could be possible to regulate exchanges dealing with fiat, but I feel like the regulable surface area is thin. Also I hope Proof of stake take over so that a big part of these issues will be non existent in a few years.
- thefounder 6y agoCrypto without fiat exchange is worthless..am I wrong? Like I would start minting my own illegal currency.
- quickthrowman 6y ago> Crypto without fiat exchange is worthless..am I wrong? You’re not wrong, Walter.
- joaomacp 6y ago> It could be possible to regulate exchanges dealing with fiat, but I feel like the regulable surface area is thin. It may be thin, but it covers most people. Most crypto buyers use fiat exchanges. If those were ruled out, the monetary value of tokens would go down, and with it the mining incentives would lower. It wouldn't be the end of crypto, but it would alleviate many issues (energy, hardware shortage, etc). PS: I don't think crypto is the only reason for GPU shortage (others being more demand from stay-at-home people, and general semiconductor shortages), but I believe it plays a part.
- leereeves 6y ago> I don't think crypto is the only reason for GPU shortage (others being more demand from stay-at-home people, and general semiconductor shortages) Then why are only GPUs unavailable? We can still easily buy CPUs, memory, SSDs, etc.
- mschuster91 6y agoMemory and SSD chips are made on older processes with coarser structures which means that they're more or less unaffected by the current limitations in manufacturing capacity that CPUs and GPUs suffer.
- bayindirh 6y ago> Then why are only GPUs unavailable? Because they're harder to build, and there is some serious HPC capacity is being built up right now around the world, which buys these chips buy thousands. Same entities which hoard Tesla GPUs are not interested in unregistered RAM, consumer SSDs and CPUs. Unfortunately, a run of the mill Tesla is not much different from a GeForce. OTOH, RAM, CPU and SSD for these applications are built from different parts.
- bko 6y agoSo basically get rid of all the legitimate use cases and leave the nefarious ones? Not everyone lives in the developed world where they can just Venmo their friends for brunch. Some people live in counties with capital controls that means they see their wealth disappear year after year. Gamers in western countries have to pay slightly higher prices for their high end gaming GPUs. Excuse me while I clutch my pearls! The cavalier attitude people have about this tech is really disheartening to see.
- leereeves 6y ago> The problem is what is illegal then? Numbers? Cryptography? What is cash? Paper? Ink? Currency isn't defined by what it's made of. > there just happen to be transactions on a distributed network, with some people knowing private keys to generate new transactions Transactions in which digital tokens are exchanged for goods, services, or other currencies, and the recipient of the tokens generally receives no benefit other than the ability to trade those tokens again. Cryptocurrencies are recognizable by the way they are used.
- reader_mode 6y agoStoping exchanges and institutional holding would pretty much kill it.
- sneak 6y agoPublishing cryptographic signatures is, in my view, protected expression. I have long maintained that cryptocurrencies aren't property: they're speech.
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- Tenoke 6y agoIt wasn't even 20 years ago that people were advised to not 'use money online' because the internet was full of scams. Sadly scammers follow both new and old tech and it takes a while for measure to catch up. That's not necessarily a fault of the tech itself.
- reader_mode 6y agoThing is crypto already has huge negative impacts and I'm yet to see any utility that would even remotely compare. It seems like the ultimate buble hype market for people to speculate on and sell bullshit stories. I have seen no proof that it solves anything the proponents have been touting for 5+ years now - just examples of increases in negative externalities. Using money online has an obvious utility.
- Semaphor 6y agoIt’s the easiest and 2nd most secure way to pay for Mullvad VPN (also used as the backend of the Mozilla VPN). The only other alternative that leaves them with nothing to log is sending cash in an envelope. Donations to people where paypal doesn’t work are also easier. Those are the only uses cases (for me) I encountered and used though ;)
- indigo945 6y agoYour VPN provider has access to your public IP already. If they were highjacked by a malicious state actor, that would be all they required anyway. Therefore, you already have to trust them, in which case you might as well just wire the money the old-fashioned way.
- Semaphor 6y agoIf you pay in other ways, there are certain logs that they are required to keep.
- freebuju 6y agoCan't get a log that has been wiped. But yes, Mullvad are only as good as their word. The other more expensive and complicated alternative would be to host your own vpn server, which still has the server provider as the trust anchor. Tor is the only network sufficient enough to thwart malicious state actor's efforts.
- baryphonic 6y ago> But seeing the HW situation, energy burn, scammers, infra hijacking, etc. there are so many negatives I'm more and more in favour of making it illegal. Machine learning has literally all of these downsides. Would you be in favor of making that technology illegal as well? What other technology and innovation should we ban because your benighted insights have determined they are too bad to continue? Before you object, a powerful ML model could be more valuable than several mining fees that could be generated by this kind of "hacking." And, sure, infrastructure hacking seems like less of an issue, since no one seems to give away free GPU time, but crypto has that constraint as well. I'd be curious to hear the justification for this neo-Luddite stance and whether it applies to other tech like ML. EDIT: initial conclusion was too judgmental/not inquisitive enough. EDIT 2: If you downvote me, then please do me the courtesy of telling me where I'm wrong. How is crypto mining different from ML training and inference with current model sizes?
- banachtarski 6y agoML requires a useful corpus of data to train on. I don’t see how the energy abuse of crypto mining is remotely replicable with ML. For me, this has nothing to do with having a “neo-Luddite stance”
- baryphonic 6y agoTraining a decently large ML model requires a huge amount of compute power. There exists specialized hardware for these purposes (e.g. TPUs, FPGAs, bespoke ASICs or even the giant wafer-sized chips from Cerebras). Besides, even after training, inference can also require huge amounts of computing power, with data requirements only a fraction of those during training. The energy usage of ML is astonishingly high, even at inference time. Getting it down to the energy efficiency of human brains is a major area of research, sort of like proof of stake. The parallels between the two domains are very strong for those who are well-versed in them, but some people seem to pick one or the other as "too dangerous to keep around" for some reason, which is literally the Luddite stance.
- jodrellblank 6y ago
- dgellow 6y agoIf that's your critic then Proof-of-Work is the issue, not crypto currencies in general. There are multiple Proof-of-Stake implementations already in production (still very young though), each with its set of properties (see Cardano, Algorand, Tezos, Polkadot, Harmony, etc).
- Jonovono 6y agoWhat do you think of Proof of Space-Time? https://spacemesh.io https://spacemesh.io
- ghgr 6y agoIt took me a while to find out the description of this proof of space-time (and check whether it's satire or not), so to save you time here's the gist of it: From the whitepaper: Loosely speaking, the PoST consists of two phases: an initialization phase (executed once), in which miners “commit” to the data that fills the space S , and an execution phase (executed repeatedly), in which miners prove that they are still storing the data. The time component of the spacetime resource is the elapsed time between successive proofs—if the interval between initialization (or the previous execution phase) and the latest execution phase is T, this proves the miner expended S · T spacetime. https://drive.google.com/file/d/18I9GPebWqgpvusI1kMnAB9nayBbL-1qN/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/18I9GPebWqgpvusI1kMnAB9nayBb...
- DougN7 6y agohttps://chia.net https://chia.net also does this. I guess the guy that designed bittorrent also designed this one.
- edf13 6y agoFrom the green paper... > We provide an initial security analysis of the Chia backbone, showing that as long as at least ≈ 61.5% of the space is controlled by honest parties Chia satisfies basic blockchain security properties. That seems to be a alarming high threshold for control of the network? So as little as 38.6% can attack the network?
- isaacremuant 6y agoI'm really curious as to Who is upvoting this take. Making something illegal won't stop it from happening. Just because tech can be used for bad purposes doesn't mean you have to or will have any effectiveness in banning it. See encryption. It's such a lazy take, ignores the freedom aspect and goes for convenience and feels like a concern troll, honestly.
- gpanders 6y agoI think the upvotes are more in the spirit of "I share your frustration and negative outlook of crypto in general" rather than an endorsement of the specific policy suggestion.
- 101011 6y agoWhile I agree that making something illegal won't stop it from happening - in this case, banning a currency drastically curtails the functionality of it. That reduces the value of it, which in turn would reduce demand and supply.
- Nursie 6y ago"Making something illegal won't stop it from happening" But in the case of cryptocurrency, putting impediments in the way of exchanging it back and forwards with 'fiat' would significantly impact its appeal and demand. Could they stop it entirely? Probably not. Would it stop most people who only care about the easy profit potential and don't care about the idealogy? Probably.
- shawnz 6y agoThere are a similar number of downsides and abuse scenarios enabled by plain old encryption technology. Does that mean we should ban it too?
- rodiger 6y agoThese are growing pains of a new technology. People used/use the internet to commit fraud too, and it wasn't exactly good for the environment. As others said, the answer here is Proof of Stake, not banning crypto outright.
- exabrial 6y agoI agree, but I think it needs to be aimed at "mined" crypto. There are cryptocurrencies that's don't involve mining and don't have those issues
- blondie9x 6y agoIt needs to be regulated, that’s a fact. Governments are behind the ball on regulating the mining of it. The environmental damage of unbounded mining is offsetting much of climate change progress.
- collsni 6y agoIllegal is a pretty strong word. We need more rights not stipulation on everything we do. Just realize what you're asking for.
- JeremyBanks 6y agoIllegal is the appropriate word when you're looking at something that's draining resources (electrical and human) in every major country and providing nothing of value in return. (I've made some nice money from crypto speculating, but that's not making the world better, that's just taking advantage of bigger fools.) Proof of work systems, which by design compete on wasting resources, need to internationally outlawed. If people want cryptocurrencies to keep going, they can get a move on finally fucking migrating to these alternatives systems they tell us are just around the corner. If none of the major networks are able to do so, they shouldn't exist.
- shkkmo 6y agoI think outlawing math is a very bad idea. If there is a regulatory route towards reducing / eliminating crypto, I would hope that involves restrictions on the fiat / crypto interchange, not restrictions on what kind of math you can do with a computer.
- prox 6y agoWe have rules against speculation because it highly skews towards people already with the necessary resources. 2008 is already a distant memory for some. Math will never be outlawed, but as it stands now it is just too speculative. I don’t have an answer, but as it stands [cryptocurrency / NFT] we need to have a lively debate on what we want it to be.
- shkkmo 6y ago> We have rules against speculation. This is so broad I am not sure which laws you reference. Most of the laws I am aware of talk about how bmuch money you must have to be allowed to speculate. > Math will never be outlawed, I wish I shared you certainty. We currently have laws about exporting some types of Math (cryptography) and we have lots politicians interested in placing further restrictions on cryptography.
- MichaelMoser123 6y agoi see crypto currencies as the only decentralized entity to act as a counterweight to the big corporations that make a living from tracking and snooping.
- RugnirViking 6y agoHow? Nothing about cryptocurrency is anonymous. Everything you ever did with them is right there in public on the Blockchain
- MichaelMoser123 6y agomonero is very anonymous; also with bitcoin i read the term "pseydonymous" - they still have to make a non trivial effort to link an address to your real identity, it is still harder than to identify you by your phone number, gmail account/apple id and credit card transactions. (even harder if you generate a new bitcoin address per transaction) https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/anonymity/ https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/anonymity/
- devwastaken 6y agoLike making drugs and alcohol illigal. Declaring something illigal doesn't stop it. It still has value - therefore it will continue on without you, and then only those that deal illigally get the benefits of crypto.
- reader_mode 6y agoI don't care if people own or trade crypto - exchanges and financial institutions should not be allowed to trade it - there's a reason those institutions are heavily regulated.
- miohtama 6y agoThis problem will resolve itself in 5-10 years when people move to proof-of-stake blockchains. There will be no more demand for proof-of-work cryptocurrencies and attacks like this are no longer economically interesting.
- skybrian 6y agoSince the downsides of proof-of-work get worse based on market price, instead of making it illegal, governments could try to crash it. A 10% wealth tax on holding proof-of-work cryptocurrency would encourage people and businesses who don’t cheat on their taxes to sell.
- mdale 6y agoLet's start with universal carbon tax / credit system to start to curb the interplay of crypto with existential planetary threat. Less worried about taxing people with piles of virtual shells more about basic survival and human quality of life. With credit systems we can have progressive rates i.e food can be a priority while VR and cryto can subsidize carbon neutral transition.
- skybrian 6y agoI'm in favor of broad-based carbon taxes but they are much less popular than targeted taxes.
- gburnett 6y agoThat is a very simplistic, and incorrect, response to the problem. GitHub provides computing resources, for free, to attract users. This is just one of the challenges of that business model. If this is intolerable for GitHub then it's up to them to find a strategy to counter it. We don't need to ask the government to punish everyone participating in cryptocurrency.
- bob1029 6y ago>That is a very simplistic, and incorrect, response to the problem. Perhaps we should consider higher-order consequences of doing absolutely nothing. Hypothetically, what happens if free-to-use code collaboration tools are forced out of the market due to rampant abuse and zero regulation? Do we care that there is now a higher barrier of entry to engage in the craft? Do you want GitHub to start requiring state-issued identification for creating new accounts? That is where this cat-mouse game is going to end up if you allow it to continue naturally.
- gburnett 6y agoIt will end up where the service provider takes it. Don't imagine that GitHub cares about lowering barriers to entry as an end in itself. It does this as a means to pursue GitHub's business interests.
- bob1029 6y agoAs long as the proposed outlawing is along lines of taxation to make legitimate holdings infeasible, rather than establishing some arbitrary # of SHA256 hashes I am legally allowed to compute per unit time.
- marsrover 5y agoThis is the saddest big brother nanny-state take I've ever heard.