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I don't think there's any political interest in looking at them right now. It's largely just a bunch of nerds playing with pretend money. It hasn't really hurt

I don't think there's any political interest in looking at them right now. It's largely just a bunch of nerds playing with pretend money. It hasn't really hurt anybody outside of it yet.

iseethroughbs 5y ago
This pretend money is currently the main driving mechanism behind the unprecedented business hacking and ransomware wave.
- yawaworht1978 5y ago
  And for things like paying for ddos attacks and money laundering in general. Ah yes, and the classic all things dark web. There is not one use case except speculation for people who are not amongst the non law abiding elements of society.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    There's always speculation. But yeah, definitely nothing else.
- meowkit 5y ago
  I prefer to look at it as crypto is exposing a market that wasn’t visible - companies need to invest in their security and 3rd party software needs to be better vetted.
SkyMarshal 5y ago
That's true, though govts are definitely looking at them. On one hand, the crypto-economy is still too small to represent the same kind of systemic risk that took down the banking system in 2007/8, so there's less urgency to do anything about it. Additionally, both governments and regulators, in the US at least, tend to prefer to let new technologies incubate and evolve for a time before regulating it more strictly. On the other hand, it's too small to have the armies of lawyers defending it that the banking system does, so it's an easier target for regulators looking for wins than Wall Street is. The SEC, CFTC, Treasury are all looking at it in the US and doing some triage regulation, only going after the most blatant and worst problems atm. I'm sure they'll step it up if/when the crypto-economy continues to grow.
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  It doesn’t matter. Anything running on the blockchain has no single point of failure. Let’s say the government outlaws Uniswap tomorrow and throws the entire team in Supermax prison for life. The protocol will just keep running forever. There’s nothing that can be done unless the government can shut down every Ethereum node in the world. Even “outlawing” Ethereum in the US wouldn’t work, unless they put in a Chinese style Internet firewall.
ArkanExplorer 5y ago
We still have widespread chip and computer shortages, and in some regions of the world electricity shortages, because of the amount of silicon and energy being wasted on mining.

I don't think there's any political interest in looking at them right now. It's largely just a bunch of nerds playing with pretend money. It hasn't really hurt anybody outside of it yet.

iseethroughbs 5y ago

This pretend money is currently the main driving mechanism behind the unprecedented business hacking and ransomware wave.

yawaworht1978 5y ago
And for things like paying for ddos attacks and money laundering in general. Ah yes, and the classic all things dark web. There is not one use case except speculation for people who are not amongst the non law abiding elements of society.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  There's always speculation. But yeah, definitely nothing else.
meowkit 5y ago
I prefer to look at it as crypto is exposing a market that wasn’t visible - companies need to invest in their security and 3rd party software needs to be better vetted.

SkyMarshal 5y ago

That's true, though govts are definitely looking at them. On one hand, the crypto-economy is still too small to represent the same kind of systemic risk that took down the banking system in 2007/8, so there's less urgency to do anything about it. Additionally, both governments and regulators, in the US at least, tend to prefer to let new technologies incubate and evolve for a time before regulating it more strictly. On the other hand, it's too small to have the armies of lawyers defending it that the banking system does, so it's an easier target for regulators looking for wins than Wall Street is. The SEC, CFTC, Treasury are all looking at it in the US and doing some triage regulation, only going after the most blatant and worst problems atm. I'm sure they'll step it up if/when the crypto-economy continues to grow.

dcolkitt 5y ago
It doesn’t matter. Anything running on the blockchain has no single point of failure. Let’s say the government outlaws Uniswap tomorrow and throws the entire team in Supermax prison for life. The protocol will just keep running forever. There’s nothing that can be done unless the government can shut down every Ethereum node in the world. Even “outlawing” Ethereum in the US wouldn’t work, unless they put in a Chinese style Internet firewall.

ArkanExplorer 5y ago

We still have widespread chip and computer shortages, and in some regions of the world electricity shortages, because of the amount of silicon and energy being wasted on mining.