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Or, we could just ban crypto exchanges in the USA (and allied nations), watch prices tank 95%, and all of the fab capacity which is now going towards Bitcoin an

Or, we could just ban crypto exchanges in the USA (and allied nations), watch prices tank 95%, and all of the fab capacity which is now going towards Bitcoin and Ethereum mining could be restored to proper productive use (alongside a big reduction in energy expenditure and ransomware).

kubb 5y ago
And nothing of value will be lost. The only issue is that the powerful that have invested in crypto will fight with their lives to prevent that.
- logicchains 5y ago
  Nothing of value to you, but thankfully nobody made you the global arbiter of what people value.
  - kubb 5y ago
    Right, otherwise people couldn't speculate on crypto prices, the horror.
    - rafael09ed 5y ago
      Might as well make it so people can't speculate on stocks or commodities.
      - minikites 5y ago
        Pork bellies have inherent value, cryptocurrency has no inherent value.
        LadyCailin 5y ago
        Neither does cash, then?
        minikites 5y ago
        What percentage of merchants accept cryptocurrency and what percentage of merchants accept cash? "Fiat currency" may not have inherent value in the same way as gold or pork bellies, but stable currencies (e.g. Euro, US dollar) are backed by governments which have incentives to be good stewards of their responsibility and if those currencies collapsed, I don't think the world would be in a state where cryptocurrency would retain any value.
      - hellbannedguy 5y ago
        Gold, and Silver, can be made into jewelry.
        lupire 5y ago
        So can bitcoins.
  - geofft 5y ago
    Thankfully? The problem is that we did make rich people the global arbiter of what people value, by giving them more units which can be used to value things. This is a fundamentally undemocratic system. Ten billionaires have way more ability to decide on something's value than ten people making minimum wage. (This is also the fallacy in "If you don't like it, why not short it and make money instead of complaining?" I don't like it, and I know my short positions aren't going to influence the market as much as some rich guy's much larger long positions.)
    - exo762 5y ago
      > This is a fundamentally undemocratic system. All modern democracies are representative. People themselves don't decide about things, their representatives do. This is the price we are willing to pay to get effective governance.
      - geofft 5y ago
        Sure, but not all representative systems are democracies. A king may represent his subjects (in foreign policy and war, for instance, and even sometimes in rituals) and generally has way more leverage to be effective at however he chooses to govern than a president or prime minister does, but it's not a democracy. One of the usual goals of a democracy is equal representation ("one person, one vote"). You can transfer your representation to someone else - either directly, in the sense of proxy voting, or indirectly, in the sense of voting for a representative - but you don't give it up permanently. When elections next happen (and if elections don't regularly happen, it's not a democracy), you get your vote back and can freely choose what to do with it, again. If your representative isn't doing what you want, you can choose another one. That's not true of the system of money. Even if it were theoretically been true at some point, once you transfer money to someone else, the associated power of that money stays with them or whoever they choose to transfer it to. If you bought Windows 95 for $209.95 a quarter century ago, that fraction of your ability to "vote" on how society values things left you a quarter century ago, after spending it exactly once on valuing Windows 95, and it probably never returned to you (unless you became a Microsoft employee or supplier). So, someone who makes something that is (rightly or wrongly) highly valued thereby accumulates the ability to value things in the future, and have disproportionate influence on what is then going to be highly valued. This process repeats continuously and has repeated for centuries.
- abaga129 5y ago
  By that logic we should ban stock exchanges as well.
  - minikites 5y ago
    Maybe not ban, but heavy regulation and taxation sounds good to me. Too much of our economy is based around ensuring high numbers for the DJIA and Nasdaq, which is not healthy for society.
  - speedgoose 5y ago
    The dream.
  - bigbillheck 5y ago
    I can agree to that.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Stock markets help allocate resources to the companies that will make good use of it. We can't say something similar about crypto until speculation stops being 99.9% of the use case and it starts being used for something more practical. We may get to that point, but that's still not a certainty.
    - wizzwizz4 5y ago
      … Do they? After an IPO, how is the glorified trading card game of stocks actually helping the companies themselves?
      - shard 5y ago
        By making stock grants valuable and thus aligning the incentives of the employees with the company?
      - kevinventullo 5y ago
        In many cases, shareholders are represented by a board of directors, to whom the CEO is beholden. Also, executives often see much of their compensation via equity in some form.
logicchains 5y ago
And watch decentralised exchanges that are even less efficient replace them. There's as much chance of successfully banning crypto as there is of successfully banning drugs (in a big part because of how useful crypto is for online drug transactions).
- kubb 5y ago
  Regulation will never work, never. It's not like trading human organs is outlawed or anything.
  - logicchains 5y ago
    If you think the human organ trade doesn't exist, some Uighurs would like a word with you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_trade#Illegal_organ_trade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_trade#Illegal_organ_trad... "Despite ordinances against organ sales, this practice persists, with studies estimating that anywhere from 5% to 42% of transplanted organs are illicitly purchased."
    - kubb 5y ago
      If you think outlawing that market doesn't drastically reduce its scale, your reality is so different than mine that there's nothing more to be said.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    If crypto only ever rises to the level of the human organ trade, it will have failed to deliver on pretty much all of its promises.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  The US could simply ban US banks and financial institutions from doing business with crypto, and from doing business with any foreign entity that does business with crypto. That would make it mostly unusable except as just another aspect of the criminal underworld shadow banking systems. That's based on the current state of crypto though. If it becomes a common medium of exchange with many people having some or all if their transactions denominated in crypto, that option kind of goes off the table.
nlitened 5y ago
Alternatively, by following the same logic we could: 1) ban computer games to free up people’s time, and grow the economy, 2) ban ML research to improve overall privacy. All these will also affect GPU prices favorably.
- speedgoose 5y ago
  Your two suggestions have more positive effects on the society than cryptomoneys.
- teitoklien 5y ago
  Let’s ban computers itself No computers No chip shortage Fixed :D
  - madengr 5y ago
    It worked in Dune, so might a well.
geofft 5y ago
The real answer, I think, is not to ban the nebulous idea of "cryptocurrency" but to ban (or highly tax) proof-of-work coins or similar schemes where the network requires a large amount of some physical resource to maintain its function. That will spur innovation on approaches that don't have that requirement.
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  There’s already rapid innovation in this direction without government innovation being necessary. Ethereum is switching to proof-of-stake by the end of the year, and partially because of that is already 50% of the way to passing Bitcoin by market cap.
- lupire 5y ago
  Just tax electricity and tariff countries who don't.
abaga129 5y ago
Do you have any numbers on how much fan capacity actually goes toward crypto mining? I would think its relatively small in the grand scheme of things.
dcolkitt 5y ago
I think the biggest pitfall in your plan is thinking that prices would respond by falling, let alone by 95%. There’s a long history of countries imposing capital controls. And it’s rarely favorable to the home country’s exchange rate. What you are proposing is basically just capital controls towards the crypto economy. Yes it will make it harder for new buyers to bid up the price of Bitcoin. But it almost certainly will induce current holders to hoard any Bitcoin they own, thus reducing supply and putting upward pressure on the price. Without a liquid market, miners are likely to hoard their rewards, creating even more Bitcoin scarcity. It also may create panic buying before the law comes in effect, or by people in foreign jurisdiction fearing the export of the policy.
- tsss 5y ago
  There is no crypto economy. It is just one giant pyramid scheme.
  - logicalmonster 5y ago
    What's a pyramid scheme? How do you define one? What attributes does a pyramid scheme have? One could easily ask what's a currency that's backed by nothing, is inflated to oblivion continuously robbing marginalized peoples' life savings, is often used for illegal drug/weapons/sex-trafficking/and worse crimes, is involved in a good percentage of the world's pollution, and that may soon be worth very little?
- randerson 5y ago
  Maybe a better strategy is to discourage crypto through fiscal policy: Imagine 90% capital gains tax on crypto profits, no credits for capital losses on crypto, 10% crypto wealth tax. Put those taxes to use fighting climate change.
  - oceanplexian 5y ago
    At 90% taxation why wouldn’t wealthy crypto holders just leave the tax jurisdiction? Like, it’s not a bunch of gold bricks or a briefcase full of paper money...It’s not controlled by a bank who can deny your transfer. Anyone can take all of their crypto anywhere on Earth, and can do so instantaneously and virtually anywhere with an Internet connection.
vmception 5y ago
Imagine thinking that’s a large part of the chip market Its a squeeze, no different than what happens to rental prices when there is 1% vacancy rates versus .5% vacancy rates
ineedasername 5y ago
I don't think crypto hardware represent a significant potion if the hardware market. Consumer electronics alone constitute about $3 Trillion.
inshadows 5y ago
Why not ban military exercises and automobiles instead?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
throwkeep 5y ago
It's wild how many people on a tech forum don't understand the next major innovation of the Internet. Crypto is up there with Netscape and smartphones.
- Chyzwar 5y ago
  People said similar things with: AI, torrents, VR/AR, quantum computers, memristors, drones, chatbots, distributed social media, Internet of things, self-driving cars, robots, dapps. Some of these technologies managed to produced something useful. On the other hand, I cannot use crypto to anything but speculation.

kubb 5y ago

And nothing of value will be lost. The only issue is that the powerful that have invested in crypto will fight with their lives to prevent that.

logicchains 5y ago
Nothing of value to you, but thankfully nobody made you the global arbiter of what people value.
- kubb 5y ago
  Right, otherwise people couldn't speculate on crypto prices, the horror.
  - rafael09ed 5y ago
    Might as well make it so people can't speculate on stocks or commodities.
    - minikites 5y ago
      Pork bellies have inherent value, cryptocurrency has no inherent value.
      - LadyCailin 5y ago
        Neither does cash, then?
        minikites 5y ago
        What percentage of merchants accept cryptocurrency and what percentage of merchants accept cash? "Fiat currency" may not have inherent value in the same way as gold or pork bellies, but stable currencies (e.g. Euro, US dollar) are backed by governments which have incentives to be good stewards of their responsibility and if those currencies collapsed, I don't think the world would be in a state where cryptocurrency would retain any value.
    - hellbannedguy 5y ago
      Gold, and Silver, can be made into jewelry.
      - lupire 5y ago
        So can bitcoins.
- geofft 5y ago
  Thankfully? The problem is that we did make rich people the global arbiter of what people value, by giving them more units which can be used to value things. This is a fundamentally undemocratic system. Ten billionaires have way more ability to decide on something's value than ten people making minimum wage. (This is also the fallacy in "If you don't like it, why not short it and make money instead of complaining?" I don't like it, and I know my short positions aren't going to influence the market as much as some rich guy's much larger long positions.)
  - exo762 5y ago
    > This is a fundamentally undemocratic system. All modern democracies are representative. People themselves don't decide about things, their representatives do. This is the price we are willing to pay to get effective governance.
    - geofft 5y ago
      Sure, but not all representative systems are democracies. A king may represent his subjects (in foreign policy and war, for instance, and even sometimes in rituals) and generally has way more leverage to be effective at however he chooses to govern than a president or prime minister does, but it's not a democracy. One of the usual goals of a democracy is equal representation ("one person, one vote"). You can transfer your representation to someone else - either directly, in the sense of proxy voting, or indirectly, in the sense of voting for a representative - but you don't give it up permanently. When elections next happen (and if elections don't regularly happen, it's not a democracy), you get your vote back and can freely choose what to do with it, again. If your representative isn't doing what you want, you can choose another one. That's not true of the system of money. Even if it were theoretically been true at some point, once you transfer money to someone else, the associated power of that money stays with them or whoever they choose to transfer it to. If you bought Windows 95 for $209.95 a quarter century ago, that fraction of your ability to "vote" on how society values things left you a quarter century ago, after spending it exactly once on valuing Windows 95, and it probably never returned to you (unless you became a Microsoft employee or supplier). So, someone who makes something that is (rightly or wrongly) highly valued thereby accumulates the ability to value things in the future, and have disproportionate influence on what is then going to be highly valued. This process repeats continuously and has repeated for centuries.
abaga129 5y ago
By that logic we should ban stock exchanges as well.
- minikites 5y ago
  Maybe not ban, but heavy regulation and taxation sounds good to me. Too much of our economy is based around ensuring high numbers for the DJIA and Nasdaq, which is not healthy for society.
- speedgoose 5y ago
  The dream.
- bigbillheck 5y ago
  I can agree to that.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Stock markets help allocate resources to the companies that will make good use of it. We can't say something similar about crypto until speculation stops being 99.9% of the use case and it starts being used for something more practical. We may get to that point, but that's still not a certainty.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    … Do they? After an IPO, how is the glorified trading card game of stocks actually helping the companies themselves?
    - shard 5y ago
      By making stock grants valuable and thus aligning the incentives of the employees with the company?
    - kevinventullo 5y ago
      In many cases, shareholders are represented by a board of directors, to whom the CEO is beholden. Also, executives often see much of their compensation via equity in some form.

logicchains 5y ago

And watch decentralised exchanges that are even less efficient replace them. There's as much chance of successfully banning crypto as there is of successfully banning drugs (in a big part because of how useful crypto is for online drug transactions).

kubb 5y ago
Regulation will never work, never. It's not like trading human organs is outlawed or anything.
- logicchains 5y ago
  If you think the human organ trade doesn't exist, some Uighurs would like a word with you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_trade#Illegal_organ_trade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_trade#Illegal_organ_trad... "Despite ordinances against organ sales, this practice persists, with studies estimating that anywhere from 5% to 42% of transplanted organs are illicitly purchased."
  - kubb 5y ago
    If you think outlawing that market doesn't drastically reduce its scale, your reality is so different than mine that there's nothing more to be said.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- ineedasername 5y ago
  If crypto only ever rises to the level of the human organ trade, it will have failed to deliver on pretty much all of its promises.
ineedasername 5y ago
The US could simply ban US banks and financial institutions from doing business with crypto, and from doing business with any foreign entity that does business with crypto. That would make it mostly unusable except as just another aspect of the criminal underworld shadow banking systems. That's based on the current state of crypto though. If it becomes a common medium of exchange with many people having some or all if their transactions denominated in crypto, that option kind of goes off the table.

nlitened 5y ago

Alternatively, by following the same logic we could: 1) ban computer games to free up people’s time, and grow the economy, 2) ban ML research to improve overall privacy. All these will also affect GPU prices favorably.

speedgoose 5y ago
Your two suggestions have more positive effects on the society than cryptomoneys.
teitoklien 5y ago
Let’s ban computers itself No computers No chip shortage Fixed :D
- madengr 5y ago
  It worked in Dune, so might a well.

geofft 5y ago

The real answer, I think, is not to ban the nebulous idea of "cryptocurrency" but to ban (or highly tax) proof-of-work coins or similar schemes where the network requires a large amount of some physical resource to maintain its function. That will spur innovation on approaches that don't have that requirement.

dcolkitt 5y ago
There’s already rapid innovation in this direction without government innovation being necessary. Ethereum is switching to proof-of-stake by the end of the year, and partially because of that is already 50% of the way to passing Bitcoin by market cap.
lupire 5y ago
Just tax electricity and tariff countries who don't.

abaga129 5y ago

Do you have any numbers on how much fan capacity actually goes toward crypto mining? I would think its relatively small in the grand scheme of things.

dcolkitt 5y ago

I think the biggest pitfall in your plan is thinking that prices would respond by falling, let alone by 95%. There’s a long history of countries imposing capital controls. And it’s rarely favorable to the home country’s exchange rate. What you are proposing is basically just capital controls towards the crypto economy. Yes it will make it harder for new buyers to bid up the price of Bitcoin. But it almost certainly will induce current holders to hoard any Bitcoin they own, thus reducing supply and putting upward pressure on the price. Without a liquid market, miners are likely to hoard their rewards, creating even more Bitcoin scarcity. It also may create panic buying before the law comes in effect, or by people in foreign jurisdiction fearing the export of the policy.

tsss 5y ago
There is no crypto economy. It is just one giant pyramid scheme.
- logicalmonster 5y ago
  What's a pyramid scheme? How do you define one? What attributes does a pyramid scheme have? One could easily ask what's a currency that's backed by nothing, is inflated to oblivion continuously robbing marginalized peoples' life savings, is often used for illegal drug/weapons/sex-trafficking/and worse crimes, is involved in a good percentage of the world's pollution, and that may soon be worth very little?
randerson 5y ago
Maybe a better strategy is to discourage crypto through fiscal policy: Imagine 90% capital gains tax on crypto profits, no credits for capital losses on crypto, 10% crypto wealth tax. Put those taxes to use fighting climate change.
- oceanplexian 5y ago
  At 90% taxation why wouldn’t wealthy crypto holders just leave the tax jurisdiction? Like, it’s not a bunch of gold bricks or a briefcase full of paper money...It’s not controlled by a bank who can deny your transfer. Anyone can take all of their crypto anywhere on Earth, and can do so instantaneously and virtually anywhere with an Internet connection.

vmception 5y ago

Imagine thinking that’s a large part of the chip market Its a squeeze, no different than what happens to rental prices when there is 1% vacancy rates versus .5% vacancy rates

ineedasername 5y ago

I don't think crypto hardware represent a significant potion if the hardware market. Consumer electronics alone constitute about $3 Trillion.

inshadows 5y ago

Why not ban military exercises and automobiles instead?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

throwkeep 5y ago

It's wild how many people on a tech forum don't understand the next major innovation of the Internet. Crypto is up there with Netscape and smartphones.

Chyzwar 5y ago
People said similar things with: AI, torrents, VR/AR, quantum computers, memristors, drones, chatbots, distributed social media, Internet of things, self-driving cars, robots, dapps. Some of these technologies managed to produced something useful. On the other hand, I cannot use crypto to anything but speculation.