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There's some good data here - that being said, even if the carbon footprint were literally zero, I couldn't personally support cryptocurrency. Fundamentally it

There's some good data here - that being said, even if the carbon footprint were literally zero, I couldn't personally support cryptocurrency. Fundamentally it's the antithesis to democracy. Say whatever you will about all forms of government, but ultimately no matter the form, there's some level of accountability. Some governments use elections to facilitate this, others use the threat of rulers being killed. One way or another, there's accountability. The fundamental political issue with cryptocurrency is now you've created some amorphous group of oligarchs whose power cannot be really removed by traditional means. It's just a regression. Even if what I'm saying doesn't come to be, at a minimum you've introduced yet another layer to our financial systems for no benefit - our current system isn't here by accident. It's here due to learnings - learnings about human nature, markets, and so forth. Because cryptocurrency doesn't exist in a vacuum, no matter what you're either enriching early adopters, leading to what I described earlier; or you are subject to the same flaws as fiat that it's trying to replace.

mathgenius 5y ago
> whose power cannot be really removed Yes. It may not be too worrisome right now, but what if the cryptocurrency phenomena became several orders of magnitude bigger? Couple that with climate wars, failed states, and malignant corporations. I can imagine some very grim outcomes indeed.
- anonporridge 5y ago
  Depends on your perspective, no? If you're the unwilling vassal of the centralized superpower that controls all the money and financial flows, then the malignant entity is the state that keeps you under boot. We might hope in theory that the democratic state that controls things has the people's best interest at heart, but an honest study of history shows that's never really been true. The state only cares about the well being on the people (and the environment) in so far as it feeds back into their own power on the global stage. And it almost necessarily has to be this way. Any democratic state that honestly cared about it's people at the expense of it's power would eventually be destroyed or overpowered by an external (or internal) organization that was more ruthless.
- VHRanger 5y ago
  You really think the internet will still be a robust system haven if this apocalypse plays out?
SkyBelow 5y ago
>whose power cannot be really removed by traditional means Can't it be removed by just not using the crypto? Crypto only has value if people buy into it making it a democratic system. People vote which crypto is best based on which they choose to use and pay attention to.
shawnz 5y ago
Why don't the provisions in the bill of rights lead to an amorphous group of oligarch gangsters and cartels who can escape prosecution because they are protected against searches/seizures/etc? Are those provisions a regression to democracy too? Why does democracy need checks and balances at all if the government is fundamentally accountable? > our current system isn't here by accident. Is cryptocurrency here "by accident"?
- trts 5y ago
  Bitcoin at least was a deliberate response to what I would paraphrase as the "socialism for the rich, capitalism for the rest" policies of the last global financial crisis. I'm not going to say it will be successful in that aim, but the idea that governments can simply create currency by fiat, donate it to their powerful, insolvent friends, pass the cost along to your grandchildren and/or degrade the value of your savings is not what I consider to be a democratic system.
  - amznthrwaway 5y ago
    Instead, you wish to create your own currency, own it with your friends, and try to degrade the purchasing power of others.
  - xadhominemx 5y ago
    > Bitcoin at least was a deliberate response to what I would paraphrase as the "socialism for the rich, capitalism for the rest" policies of the last global financial crisis. Was it actually, though?
    - pshc 5y ago
      Ostensibly, yes, with the genesis block containing the string "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks"
      - xadhominemx 5y ago
        Ostensibly, ya. But really, I don’t think so.
tromp 5y ago
> now you've created some amorphous group of oligarchs Only to the extent that the coin is premined or that the emission is heavily concentrated on the first few years. This should be much less of a problem with a purely linear emission (never changing block reward), that takes a century to get yearly supply inflation to under 1%.
- lottin 5y ago
  Nobody cares about supply inflation.
chemmail 5y ago
Democracy only works in very strict conditions. For the educated and the middle class. For everyone else in the world, it just doesn't work. If the world was under that exact condition, it would be considered dystopian.
nolantait 5y ago
What about the idea that it acts as a balancing weight to the perverse incentives for countries to debase their currency? Radically if the relationship to taxation was more of a voluntary customer relationship it could lead to better outcomes, ignoring how many more problems it might bring. Thoughts?
- endisneigh 5y ago
  Focusing on democratic nations specifically for a moment - I don't see how it could be a balancing weight. Presumably all issues with a country and its handling of their own currency could be resolved solely through democratic political means. No technical solution - cryptocurrency or otherwise - necessary. I don't really understand your second point. Taxation by definition is involuntary. I won't discuss the merits of taxation (vs. detriments) but a "voluntary taxation" system would result in a prisoners dilemma where no one would pay taxes. Eventually the government that implements such a thing would be no longer able to fund itself and in quick succession find itself literally bankrupt.
  - nolantait 5y ago
    For example, Keynsian economics requires everyone to be forced to save through a central banking system. Otherwise the whole thing collapses. Keynsian economics has dominated the last 100 years of politics. Crypto gives you an escape which puts a check politicians who would be forced to be less spendy. The only other way of enforcing this would attack the ways in which politicians trade favor which seems impossible. I can't see a single reason to stop spending as a politician if you can print money. Your political time horizon is shorter than the detrimental effects of your spending so the voting population is unable to de-obfuscate the cause of their purchasing power falling rapidly. I usually hear people blame the rich as a knee-jerk reaction instead.
    - bserge 5y ago
      Oh, why would they be less spendy when they can just take your crypto escape away by physical force?
dqx 5y ago
How effective were the traditional means of removing oligarchs? The US just elected a game show host president 4 years ago.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  Is the game show host still president?
  - NoGravitas 5y ago
    25% of all Americans, and 53% of self-identified Republicans believe so.
  - haswell 5y ago
    The fact that he is not does not invalidate the parent comment and your question sidesteps the fact that he left lasting damage that is still playing out on the political stage today.
    - endisneigh 5y ago
      It literally does. He was democratically removed. The fact he left lasting damage is besides the point, and no system of government can prevent bad actors, only minimize the damage.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - dqx 5y ago
        He was an oligarch, and then was democratically elected. His supreme court appointees will continue to enforce his policies for the rest of their lives. > no system of government can prevent bad actors Everything's the same! So crypto's no worse then?
        endisneigh 5y ago
seibelj 5y ago
The Pandora Papers recently released had terabytes of data and 13 million documents of how the richest people and politicians on earth avoid taxes. Bitcoin was used exactly zero times.
- piggybox 5y ago
  By definition, bitcoin transactions are not traceable, right?
  - anonporridge 5y ago
    Literally no. Base layer bitcoin transactions (all the large value ones) happen on the public blockchain. It's pseudonymous, but if you can attach an identity to one transaction, you have a good chance of tracing everything else they've done. And even if you don't know who everyone is today, you might be able to deanonymize it at some point in the future, because all the data is public.
  - seibelj 5y ago
    Bitcoin transactions are far more traceable and easy to scan than it is to track payments in the offshore world, which involves many jurisdictions, subpoenas, judges, delays, getting stonewalled, etc. Night and day difference in ability to track.
    - tornato7 5y ago
      Indeed, once you figure out someone's wallet address it becomes trivial to trace their transactions back to the beginning of Bitcoin.
      - geysersam 5y ago
        If they use the same address forever yes.
  - joshmarlow 5y ago
    I kind of wonder if HN will block me for posting the same comment, but it's so frequently relevant. > By definition, bitcoin transactions are not traceable, right? Michael Morell, a former acting director of the CIA, has some things to say about the use of BTC in crime: > Based on our research and discussions with industry experts, I have confidence in two conclusions: • The broad generalizations about the use of Bitcoin in illicit finance are significantly overstated. • The blockchain ledger on which Bitcoin transactions are recorded is an underutilized forensic tool that can be used more widely by law enforcement and the intelligence community to identify and disrupt illicit activities. Put simply, blockchain analysis is a highly effective crime fighting and intelligence gathering tool. Source: https://casebitcoin.com/story/former-cia-director-finds-bitcoins-use-in-illicit-finance-to-b https://casebitcoin.com/story/former-cia-director-finds-bitc...
bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
The benefits are that the government isn’t in control of the monetary supply. Period. If that doesn’t seem like a benefit, then of course cryptocurrency seems useless.
- yladiz 5y ago
  Why is that a benefit?
  - philwelch 5y ago
    Have you observed the American federal government lately?
  - theyx 5y ago
    Because some people convinced themselves that government is bad, even though democratic governments were the GOAL of almost every nation in the pre-independence days. If people cannot trust the institutions that they themselves built, it says more about the morals of those voting than about those so-called corrupt governments.
    - mavhc 5y ago
      Governments are so terrible that every group of people on Earth invented them
MadSudaca 5y ago
What about the benefit to the rest of society? Everyone else will, in theory, have some of the same powers that the oligarchs have.
- foepys 5y ago
  If you own any money, you also have "some of the same powers" that the oligarchs have. Maybe you can bribe a bouncer to let you into he club, maybe buy nice shoes and impress at a job interview. It's just so little compared to the oligarchs that it doesn't matter.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  You can do that with a democracy. What benefits do crypto bring?
  - danuker 5y ago
    Not a lot of countries are democracies. Politicians listen to lobbyists more than citizens. With crypto, you don't have to suffer because of them messing up the economy.
    - mavhc 5y ago
      When did you suffer because a government messed up the economy?
    - lottin 5y ago
      > With crypto, you don't have to suffer because of them messing up the economy. So you won't be affected by unemployment? Poor public services and infrastructure? Corruption? Police brutality? Crime? Because you have crypto. Open your fucking eyes.
- eterm 5y ago
  Trickle down cryptonomics?
astoor 5y ago
> "now you've created some amorphous group of oligarchs whose power cannot be really removed by traditional means. It's just a regression." "With the privatisation of money creation and the proliferation of decentralised currency fiefdoms, it was in many ways like a return to feudalism..."
tshaddox 5y ago
You have an interesting way of putting it. I pretty agree with your criticism although I would frame it as "having all the same problems that our large wealthy democratic national governments have" rather than "antithetical to democracy." I suppose the only difference is our opinions of democracy as it's practiced.
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  Uh, cryptocurrencies can't have "the same problems that our large wealthy democratic national governments" - cryptocurrencies aren't institutions, they don't hold elections, have bureaucracies or have head administrators. I think you're trying to say that a cryptocurrency fuel regime would have the same problem as current democracies. But just cryptocurrencies added to what exists today and as the gp points out, will act to increase all the problematic qualities of the present situation.
MildlySerious 5y ago
I would generally agree, and have brought up my concerns in regards to accountability before. (not in the context of crypto) And while this is true in theory, the reality as far as I can tell is that we already have a system of no accountability - for a certain privileged sub-group of society. All crypto does is to level the field, and that's a big net win in my book. Now if panama and paradise papers had lead to anything other than journalists getting killed, trillion dollar corporations didn't keep buying up and stifling competition, insider trading by CEOs and politicians wasn't rampant, politics as a whole was not a money game and celebrities and high ranking officials didn't get off scoff free for crimes that would put lesser fortunate or connected individuals behind bars for years if not decades, maybe, maybe then accountability would be a valid point. Until then I will celebrate the fact that the odds are a little more evened out now than they were before.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  > And while this is true in theory, the reality as far as I can tell is that we already have a system of no accountability - for a certain privileged sub-group of society. All crypto does is to level the field, and that's a big net win in my book. This isn't true at all. What you describe isn't really relevant to cryptocurrency. You might as well advocate for the abolition of taxation to "even the playing field." The resulting societal disaster be darned.
  - MildlySerious 5y ago
    > You might as well advocate for the abolition of taxation to "even the playing field." The resulting societal disaster be darned. No, not at all. Taxation is another broken system that needs to be fixed, not abolished. Voting has proven to do nothing. The act of protesting has done little, and continues to be attacked with nonsense bills. All that's left is what everyone has been repeating for the past five decades: To vote with our money. Now people are creating ways to remove their money from systems that are controlled by regulators that continue to disappoint. It's a consequence more than it is anything else. Obviously this, too, has its own set of drawbacks, but "societal disaster" really is not the one I'm worried about, because we're already headed that way with what he have right now.
dogman144 5y ago
The creation of a new gilded class is definitely a valid side effect in the event cryptocurrencies really do extend into a mainstream form of transaction/economic activity. what's doubly interesting is that group, especially as the early adopters are the ones with massive holdings, tend to have fairly intensely libertarian views. a potent combo of "i put my money where my mouth is" and "i was right" and "none of you believed me" is sure to be present in some ultra-wealth people. the primitives i'd push back on is this though, are these not the anthesis to democracy as well as you've defined it? - inflation hits the poorest classes the hardest re: devaluing their largely all-cash savings, and they have no accountability measures to change that. who will they call, the fed? their senators who approved the fed chair? - how do consensus algorithms and the open source nature of cryptocurrencies factor into your judgement? provide provide a visible way for anyone to audit and approve of (via participation in) a currency system of their choice. that's a strong feedback loop.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  > - inflation hits the poorest classes the hardest re: devaluing their largely all-cash savings, and they have no accountability measures to change that. who will they call, the fed? their senators who approved the fed chair? Inflation generally hurts the middle-class the most. Poor people generally don't have savings and are debtors. Debtors benefit from inflation. Cryptocurrency being open source isn't really relevant to my point. To your first point, the current views of holders isn't relevant as personalities are certainly not immutable, and as well all know, power corrupts.
  - elliekelly 5y ago
    There isn’t going to be a middle class left to hurt anyway.
  - reedjosh 5y ago
    > Inflation generally hurts the middle-class the most. The middle class typically has a mortgage and student loan debt for which inflation benefits them. The closer you are to the spiket, the more debt based inflation benefits you. The poor do lose the most.
agumonkey 5y ago
good luck trying to instill that in the mind of people in crypto a lot of them are naively thinking "crypto will become the new world, i believe in it, it's obvious, we have to do it, we have to free the people from <bad past>"
RandomLensman 5y ago
Their power can be easily removed by larger state actors, not an issue at all. Just imagine the compute power a few 100 billion $ could unleash. And, of course, there is traditional direct action (from stopping all legal uses/on and off ramps all the way to violence).
chroem- 5y ago
> Fundamentally it's the antithesis to democracy. What is this even supposed to mean? Strict state controls on economic activity are more within the realm of authoritarian regimes, rather than democracies.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  Democracies depends on transparency, accountability and the rule of law. Cyrptocurrencies are fundementally more anarchic than democratic.
  - Bokkuren 5y ago
    Hmm... They are anarchic in theory but in practice there's a strong hierarchy - few rich guys control the majority of coins.
  - chroem- 5y ago
    Democracy is primarily about representation and individual freedom. "Rule of law" is one of the main selling points of authoritarian ideologies. Are you sure you didn't drop a minus sign somewhere?
    - imtringued 5y ago
      I prefer laws over guns.
      - reedjosh 5y ago
        Laws are enforced with guns.
        gfodor 5y ago
        Except in crypto.
    - shkkmo 5y ago
      Authoritarian regimes don't have "rule of law". The entire point is that all institutions in an Authoritarian country are under the control of the authoritarian leader/party. If the judicial system has independent power and can hold the rulers accountable when the violate the law, it isn't an authoritarian regime. This is precisely why the US has a system of checks and balances and why the judicial system is an important part of that.
DantesKite 5y ago
Agreed. I like to make this joke often: What's the difference between communism and bitcoin? Communism has actually been tried in practice.
- philwelch 5y ago
  With bitcoin, you can get things the government doesn't want you to have. With communism, you can't even get things the government does want you to have.
coralreef 5y ago
> The fundamental political issue with cryptocurrency is now you've created some amorphous group of oligarchs whose power cannot be really removed by traditional means. It's just a regression. That's an interesting way of describing open source software, whose existence depends on nodes willingly adopting and agreeing to a set of protocols. I'm guessing its far easier to fork a chain and convince people to join a new network, than it is to overthrow a central bank/government.
- tomComb 5y ago
  It's not about the software, it's about the currency and the people who own it.
  - coralreef 5y ago
    By "own" it, does that mean speculators who have coin in wallets, or the open source maintainers whom have influence, or both? Either way, the only way a coin or chain has value is by people participating in it, whether that's buying, transacting, mining, hosting nodes, or developing. In fact, the system is so open to competition, you can fork a chain and take all its existing data to support your new network. You can't do that with Facebook, Uber, or Paypal.
hackingforfun 5y ago
> Fundamentally it's the antithesis to democracy. No one is forced to use crypto. No one is forced to mine it. No one is forced to use it at all. Is this not democratic? The users choose whether they want to use it, miners choose whether to mine it, and the "lack of accountability" you suggest, I just don't agree with at all. Crypto removes the need for government fiat. There is no need for a central authority any more over money supply. If you don't like it, fork it, or create a new crypto, and market it. See if it catches on. The democracy of the people will decide whether to use it or not. Some cryptos also have voting / governance rights, so the users can democratically vote on protocols, directly. In comparison, if I want a law to change at the federal level in the US, first of all there has to be a bill created in support of it (which I have almost zero control over), and then I can call my senator and ask that they support that bill. At that point they can choose to listen or not. I assume they will just do whatever is in their interest to stay in power and support their friends in government that supported them before, not to mention the lobbyists. Even my vote for president in the US in the end is decided by the electoral college, not by the popular vote. How is all of that democratic? I understand the energy concerns with crypto, but since you are figuring in a zero carbon footprint, I disagree and think you completely miss the benefits that crypto offers over existing systems. In the end, time will tell and I think there's almost no way that blockchain and crypto won't play a major part in future economies and governance.
- mavhc 5y ago
  Only reason people jump on cryptocurrencies is their pyramid scheme type nature, get in first or lose out. They're not currencies, they're speculation. People want to spend currencies, why would you ever spend bitcoin when it's designed to always increase in value? Governments are their citizens, they're just people we picked. If you hate the people that are running, there's a built in solution, get someone better to run. That's the fundamental part of democracy, anyone can run for office. Why is a central control over money supply bad? Lets you attempt to control the boom/bust cycle.
  - lottin 5y ago
    The idea that a product (e.g. bitcoin) can be designed in such a way as to always increase in price has to be dismissed as crackpottery.
brightball 5y ago
On one hand, I agree with you. On the other hand, mistakes made at the federal level are virtually impossible to reverse. Every new change becomes a new layer that’s harder and harder to pull back and fix.
philwelch 5y ago
> The fundamental political issue with cryptocurrency is now you've created some amorphous group of oligarchs whose power cannot be really removed by traditional means. It's just a regression. If you're worried about currency falling under the control of an unaccountable group of oligarchs who can't easily be removed, I have some bad news for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Board_of_Governors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Board_of_Gover... The most traditional means of removing oligarchs is for an angry mob to murder them and their entire families. Does cryptocurrency prevent that? Maybe if you don't know who the oligarchs are. But cryptocurrency also doesn't really require that, either. A currency is only valuable when enough people believe that it is valuable. If there's an actual problem with a particular coin, people can switch coins--which they can't with fiat. Oligarchs, or at least powerful elites, are more or less a human universal in cultures of a sufficient size and complexity. The main difference with democracy is that democracy makes it far easier to gain power through demagoguery and propaganda. > Even if what I'm saying doesn't come to be, at a minimum you've introduced yet another layer to our financial systems for no benefit - our current system isn't here by accident. It's here due to learnings - learnings about human nature, markets, and so forth. To what ends? Among other things, fiat currency makes individual human beings more governable. Cryptocurrency makes individual human beings less governable. The more governable the private individual becomes, the easier it becomes for an oligarchy to oppress him.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  > If you're worried about currency falling under the control of an unaccountable group of oligarchs who can't easily be removed, I have some bad news for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Board_of_Gover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Board_of_Gover... These are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, both of which are elected by people democratically. In addition if any of them were particularly egregious, a motivated populace could amend the constitution via no representatives and kick them out anyway. So...
  - philwelch 5y ago
    > These are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, both of which are elected by people democratically. Do you know a single person who, in their entire lives, has ever voted for either their President or their Senator primarily on the basis of Federal Reserve Board appointments? Most voters don't even know the constitutional duties of the President. Presidential candidates are (mostly) front men for unaccountable groups of oligarchs who can't easily be removed.
thehappypm 5y ago
Our democratic leaders killed the gold standard. We decided gold wasn't the best currency instrument. A decentralized currency system doesn't have such democratic flexibility.
Trias11 5y ago
>>> our current system isn't here by accident And dinasaurs weren't on earth by accident. They were part of evolution and then replaced with other species more appropriate for evolving earth and conditions.
- imtringued 5y ago
  Bitcoin is just the gold standard but worse. With gold you can at least dig up more of it as your economy grows. Bitcoin doesn't care about the real economy.
  - md2020 5y ago
    What? There’s a finite supply of gold just like there’s a finite supply of Bitcoin. You can mine more Bitcoin just like you can dig up more gold, up until there’s no more to be mined.
  - cwkoss 5y ago
    The idea that bitcoin should be the sole currency for a nation is silly and only promoted by shallow-thinking "to the moon" bulls. Bitcoin (if successful) will serve as an international safe haven from reckless monetary policy. It counterbalances fiat, it doesn't replace it.
  - Trias11 5y ago
    Buy some gold coins and then try to move it across the borders. 1. You need to fill-in paperwork and be on a mercy of a local DHS official to be allowed. At any time regulation will and can change without you knowing about it. 2. Try to move it without paperwork and risk losing it all 3. Try to store it in the bank and risk of government/bank/courts to lock you out of your gold savings. 4. Try to store it on your own and risk losing it all to crime. 5. Entering another country - same risks with their customs as above. 6. Moving bitcoin across borders is a bit easier
MelonTree 5y ago
100 years ago, you would've used the same argument to try ban cars. They're fundamentally antithetical to democracy, as they allow anyone to .. commit crimes and get away with it.
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  Banning cars 100 years ago would, in retrospect, have clearly been the correct decision.
keymone 5y ago
Lol look at this dude thinking oligarchs didn’t exist before cryptocurrencies. It’s not any form of store of wealth that perpetuates the oligarchies, it’s unwillingness and corruptibility of political class that allows them to exist. Half of fucking london is owned by oligarchs as an investment haven, so until you publicly come out in support of demolishing that atrocity, don’t even utter a sound against cryptocurrencies, that just makes you a laughable hypocrite. Not to mention that store of wealth is completely orthogonal to political systems and free access to store of wealth and transaction system that isn’t fuckedup-able by “government” should be basic human right.
spinny 5y ago
> Fundamentally it's the antithesis to democracy. Really? A small group of people controlling the money supply is democracy to you?? What do you see as democratic in the fiat money system? > The fundamental political issue with cryptocurrency is now you've created some amorphous group of oligarchs whose power cannot be really removed by traditional means. It's just a regression. Instead there is some amorphous group of oligarchs whose power can be removed by force. This is an issue to me. When people talk about "removal of power" always sound authoritarian. I assume that you are ok with Jack Ma "vanishing" for some months after saying the wrong thing? > yet another layer to our financial systems for no benefit Not another layer added to the current system, but a new system > It's here due to learnings - learnings about human nature, markets, and so forth. Agree. It's also outdated. At some point in time rai/fei stones were good enough for the yap people. Many of the defi apps are built with knowledge from the centralized finance world. It's an evolution. It doesn't look like it now because we are still at a very early stage.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  > A small group of people controlling the money supply is democracy to you?? What do you see as democratic in the fiat money system? Absolutely. The current monetary system is controlled by the people. The Fed was created by an act of congress and continues to operate at the whim of Congress. Its mandate is to maintain a low, fixed rate of inflation and maximum employment - while being at arms length of the executive itself to provide predictability and stability across administrations. The ruling class of Bitcoiners act to manipulate the price both up and down for their own personal gain. [edit] Doge co-creator Jackson Palmer's analysis is spot on. [1] [1] https://twitter.com/ummjackson/status/1415353984617914370?s=20 https://twitter.com/ummjackson/status/1415353984617914370?s=...
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    > After years of studying it, I believe that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology built primarily to amplify the wealth of its proponents through a combination of tax avoidance, diminished regulatory oversight and artificially enforced scarcity. [1]
iskander 5y ago
Personally, if not for the real world resource usage, I would be extremely supportive of cryptocurrencies replacing the traditional financial system for reasons that overlap with your reasons for opposing crypto. Essentially, the financial sector has succeeded so wildly in regulatory capture that we have lost any semblance of democratic control over banks and are unable to dispense punitive consequences for large scale criminal behavior in finance. There have still been no consequences for large banks issuing known bad mortgages in the early 2000s and then reselling those mortgages in bundles with artificially inflated default rate claims. This "trick" was deployed by most major banks and lead to disastrous consequences for people far removed from finance. Having a route to opt out of traditional finance for e.g. savings accounts, loans, and basic investments, feels like it actually improves the health of our democracy.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  Wouldn't the solution be to educate people and get more people to participate in our democracy? Why do you think cryptocurrencies are better?
  - openfuture 5y ago
    Any "solution" that rests on "educating people" is not going to work. What works is incentives and design that makes it hard to misuse or obvious how to use.
    - endisneigh 5y ago
      > Any "solution" that rests on "educating people" is not going to work. This is not true at all, lol. How do you think modern civilization came to be?
      - openfuture 5y ago
        Man, I think our premises are incompatible, I view "civilization" as regression and arrogance (read the Wikipedia intro or dictionary definition and tell me otherwise). It doesn't solve anything for anyone, it's just an effective system of slavery.
glerk 5y ago
> Fundamentally it's the antithesis to democracy. Good. I never consented to capital controls, property confiscation, drug laws and all the other blessings that “democracy” has bestowed on me. Finally there might be a path to opting out.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  hey, I appreciate your honesty - though if you care about those things, you should become more engaged politically.
  - dorgo 5y ago
    maybe getting involved in a crypto project is political engagement.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  > Good. I never consented to capital controls, property confiscation, drug laws and all the other blessings that “democracy” has bestowed on me. Finally there might be a path to opting out. And none of that has anything whatsoever to do with monetary policy. This is a quixotic quest.
thesausageking 5y ago
No one elected the Fed and they print USD like crazy. They're now proposing to print more money to solve climate change. That's the opposite of democracy. Bitcoin is a transparent, simple currency. There will only ever be 21m Bitcoins and how they're minted is defined up front and everyone knows.
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  No one elected the Fed and they print USD like crazy. The Fed is combination of officials appointed by elected representatives and official of banks, with appointed officials having something of the lead. Representative democracy involves things like this. They're now proposing to print more money to solve climate change. That's the opposite of democracy. The printing of money here is effectively a tax. Taxing the population and using the revenues for programs to benefit people is how a state works (in this case, a (slightly) democratic state). If anything, it seems you're proposing the wealthy not be subject to taxes oriented towards to common good, which is what the gp was (correctly imo) upset about. The only thing here is you're calling the power of the wealthy "democracy".
  - thesausageking 5y ago
    Printing money functions like a tax, but it's not a tax. It was never proposed and debated by congress and then passed. > If anything, it seems you're proposing the wealthy not be subject to taxes oriented towards to common good, which is what the op was (correctly imo) upset about. I'm proposing the opposite. The money printing since 1971 has been one of the major drivers of inequality. If you own a lot of assets like stocks and real estate the last year and half of printing dollars has been tremendously good for you. If you work for a living and your income is mainly your salary, it hasn't. Your rent has gone up while your wages and opportunities have lagged.
    - joe_the_user 5y ago
      If you own a lot of assets like stocks and real estate the last year and half of printing dollars has been tremendously good for you. If you work for a living and your income is mainly your salary, it hasn't. Your rent has gone up while your wages and opportunities have lagged. This is true. Yet somehow people expect bitcoin to change that rather than exacerbate this. It's pretty obvious that bitcoin is only going to help a select group of people. After all, if it catches on, people who own this asset will benefit and no one else will, obviously.
lrvick 5y ago
Accountability could be even easier in cryptoassets in the form of smart contracts and public ledgers. Imagine if the wallet addresses of every politician were public and we could all see every donation -and- large donations would be automatically rejected by a smart contract unless they are signed and identified by the keys of a public notary they have disclosed their identity to. (There is already one public Notary in Washington that can certify identity with their registered RSA key as a form of seal) Cryptoassets can allow us to write our financial laws into code so we don't have to rely on the honor system as much.
- hackingforfun 5y ago
  I love this idea! But there's no way politicians are going to vote for it. This points to part of the problem, that politicians are first and foremost for themselves, not for their people.
majortennis 5y ago
it's a good hedge against inflation. A block chain can be fully accountable
sktrdie 5y ago
I don't understand this. The whole point of the p2p system is that you vote with the software you have installed. If people want to remove oligarchs that control the system they can simply move to a different kind of software, leaving the oligarchs with little or no value of their coins. In fact that was the whole selling point for me of cryptocurrencies. Anybody can join and shape the system by agreeing on the type of software and creating a system that can be easily shaped (through software) instead of a system that is quite hard to shape (current financial system).

mathgenius 5y ago

> whose power cannot be really removed Yes. It may not be too worrisome right now, but what if the cryptocurrency phenomena became several orders of magnitude bigger? Couple that with climate wars, failed states, and malignant corporations. I can imagine some very grim outcomes indeed.

anonporridge 5y ago
Depends on your perspective, no? If you're the unwilling vassal of the centralized superpower that controls all the money and financial flows, then the malignant entity is the state that keeps you under boot. We might hope in theory that the democratic state that controls things has the people's best interest at heart, but an honest study of history shows that's never really been true. The state only cares about the well being on the people (and the environment) in so far as it feeds back into their own power on the global stage. And it almost necessarily has to be this way. Any democratic state that honestly cared about it's people at the expense of it's power would eventually be destroyed or overpowered by an external (or internal) organization that was more ruthless.
VHRanger 5y ago
You really think the internet will still be a robust system haven if this apocalypse plays out?

SkyBelow 5y ago

>whose power cannot be really removed by traditional means Can't it be removed by just not using the crypto? Crypto only has value if people buy into it making it a democratic system. People vote which crypto is best based on which they choose to use and pay attention to.

shawnz 5y ago

Why don't the provisions in the bill of rights lead to an amorphous group of oligarch gangsters and cartels who can escape prosecution because they are protected against searches/seizures/etc? Are those provisions a regression to democracy too? Why does democracy need checks and balances at all if the government is fundamentally accountable? > our current system isn't here by accident. Is cryptocurrency here "by accident"?

trts 5y ago
Bitcoin at least was a deliberate response to what I would paraphrase as the "socialism for the rich, capitalism for the rest" policies of the last global financial crisis. I'm not going to say it will be successful in that aim, but the idea that governments can simply create currency by fiat, donate it to their powerful, insolvent friends, pass the cost along to your grandchildren and/or degrade the value of your savings is not what I consider to be a democratic system.
- amznthrwaway 5y ago
  Instead, you wish to create your own currency, own it with your friends, and try to degrade the purchasing power of others.
- xadhominemx 5y ago
  > Bitcoin at least was a deliberate response to what I would paraphrase as the "socialism for the rich, capitalism for the rest" policies of the last global financial crisis. Was it actually, though?
  - pshc 5y ago
    Ostensibly, yes, with the genesis block containing the string "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks"
    - xadhominemx 5y ago
      Ostensibly, ya. But really, I don’t think so.

tromp 5y ago

> now you've created some amorphous group of oligarchs Only to the extent that the coin is premined or that the emission is heavily concentrated on the first few years. This should be much less of a problem with a purely linear emission (never changing block reward), that takes a century to get yearly supply inflation to under 1%.

lottin 5y ago
Nobody cares about supply inflation.

chemmail 5y ago

Democracy only works in very strict conditions. For the educated and the middle class. For everyone else in the world, it just doesn't work. If the world was under that exact condition, it would be considered dystopian.

nolantait 5y ago

What about the idea that it acts as a balancing weight to the perverse incentives for countries to debase their currency? Radically if the relationship to taxation was more of a voluntary customer relationship it could lead to better outcomes, ignoring how many more problems it might bring. Thoughts?

endisneigh 5y ago
Focusing on democratic nations specifically for a moment - I don't see how it could be a balancing weight. Presumably all issues with a country and its handling of their own currency could be resolved solely through democratic political means. No technical solution - cryptocurrency or otherwise - necessary. I don't really understand your second point. Taxation by definition is involuntary. I won't discuss the merits of taxation (vs. detriments) but a "voluntary taxation" system would result in a prisoners dilemma where no one would pay taxes. Eventually the government that implements such a thing would be no longer able to fund itself and in quick succession find itself literally bankrupt.
- nolantait 5y ago
  For example, Keynsian economics requires everyone to be forced to save through a central banking system. Otherwise the whole thing collapses. Keynsian economics has dominated the last 100 years of politics. Crypto gives you an escape which puts a check politicians who would be forced to be less spendy. The only other way of enforcing this would attack the ways in which politicians trade favor which seems impossible. I can't see a single reason to stop spending as a politician if you can print money. Your political time horizon is shorter than the detrimental effects of your spending so the voting population is unable to de-obfuscate the cause of their purchasing power falling rapidly. I usually hear people blame the rich as a knee-jerk reaction instead.
  - bserge 5y ago
    Oh, why would they be less spendy when they can just take your crypto escape away by physical force?

dqx 5y ago

How effective were the traditional means of removing oligarchs? The US just elected a game show host president 4 years ago.

endisneigh 5y ago
Is the game show host still president?
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  25% of all Americans, and 53% of self-identified Republicans believe so.
- haswell 5y ago
  The fact that he is not does not invalidate the parent comment and your question sidesteps the fact that he left lasting damage that is still playing out on the political stage today.
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    It literally does. He was democratically removed. The fact he left lasting damage is besides the point, and no system of government can prevent bad actors, only minimize the damage.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - dqx 5y ago
      He was an oligarch, and then was democratically elected. His supreme court appointees will continue to enforce his policies for the rest of their lives. > no system of government can prevent bad actors Everything's the same! So crypto's no worse then?
      - endisneigh 5y ago

seibelj 5y ago

The Pandora Papers recently released had terabytes of data and 13 million documents of how the richest people and politicians on earth avoid taxes. Bitcoin was used exactly zero times.

piggybox 5y ago
By definition, bitcoin transactions are not traceable, right?
- anonporridge 5y ago
  Literally no. Base layer bitcoin transactions (all the large value ones) happen on the public blockchain. It's pseudonymous, but if you can attach an identity to one transaction, you have a good chance of tracing everything else they've done. And even if you don't know who everyone is today, you might be able to deanonymize it at some point in the future, because all the data is public.
- seibelj 5y ago
  Bitcoin transactions are far more traceable and easy to scan than it is to track payments in the offshore world, which involves many jurisdictions, subpoenas, judges, delays, getting stonewalled, etc. Night and day difference in ability to track.
  - tornato7 5y ago
    Indeed, once you figure out someone's wallet address it becomes trivial to trace their transactions back to the beginning of Bitcoin.
    - geysersam 5y ago
      If they use the same address forever yes.
- joshmarlow 5y ago
  I kind of wonder if HN will block me for posting the same comment, but it's so frequently relevant. > By definition, bitcoin transactions are not traceable, right? Michael Morell, a former acting director of the CIA, has some things to say about the use of BTC in crime: > Based on our research and discussions with industry experts, I have confidence in two conclusions: • The broad generalizations about the use of Bitcoin in illicit finance are significantly overstated. • The blockchain ledger on which Bitcoin transactions are recorded is an underutilized forensic tool that can be used more widely by law enforcement and the intelligence community to identify and disrupt illicit activities. Put simply, blockchain analysis is a highly effective crime fighting and intelligence gathering tool. Source: https://casebitcoin.com/story/former-cia-director-finds-bitcoins-use-in-illicit-finance-to-b https://casebitcoin.com/story/former-cia-director-finds-bitc...

bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago

The benefits are that the government isn’t in control of the monetary supply. Period. If that doesn’t seem like a benefit, then of course cryptocurrency seems useless.

yladiz 5y ago
Why is that a benefit?
- philwelch 5y ago
  Have you observed the American federal government lately?
- theyx 5y ago
  Because some people convinced themselves that government is bad, even though democratic governments were the GOAL of almost every nation in the pre-independence days. If people cannot trust the institutions that they themselves built, it says more about the morals of those voting than about those so-called corrupt governments.
  - mavhc 5y ago
    Governments are so terrible that every group of people on Earth invented them

MadSudaca 5y ago

What about the benefit to the rest of society? Everyone else will, in theory, have some of the same powers that the oligarchs have.

foepys 5y ago
If you own any money, you also have "some of the same powers" that the oligarchs have. Maybe you can bribe a bouncer to let you into he club, maybe buy nice shoes and impress at a job interview. It's just so little compared to the oligarchs that it doesn't matter.
endisneigh 5y ago
You can do that with a democracy. What benefits do crypto bring?
- danuker 5y ago
  Not a lot of countries are democracies. Politicians listen to lobbyists more than citizens. With crypto, you don't have to suffer because of them messing up the economy.
  - mavhc 5y ago
    When did you suffer because a government messed up the economy?
  - lottin 5y ago
    > With crypto, you don't have to suffer because of them messing up the economy. So you won't be affected by unemployment? Poor public services and infrastructure? Corruption? Police brutality? Crime? Because you have crypto. Open your fucking eyes.
eterm 5y ago
Trickle down cryptonomics?

astoor 5y ago

> "now you've created some amorphous group of oligarchs whose power cannot be really removed by traditional means. It's just a regression." "With the privatisation of money creation and the proliferation of decentralised currency fiefdoms, it was in many ways like a return to feudalism..."

tshaddox 5y ago

You have an interesting way of putting it. I pretty agree with your criticism although I would frame it as "having all the same problems that our large wealthy democratic national governments have" rather than "antithetical to democracy." I suppose the only difference is our opinions of democracy as it's practiced.

joe_the_user 5y ago
Uh, cryptocurrencies can't have "the same problems that our large wealthy democratic national governments" - cryptocurrencies aren't institutions, they don't hold elections, have bureaucracies or have head administrators. I think you're trying to say that a cryptocurrency fuel regime would have the same problem as current democracies. But just cryptocurrencies added to what exists today and as the gp points out, will act to increase all the problematic qualities of the present situation.

MildlySerious 5y ago

I would generally agree, and have brought up my concerns in regards to accountability before. (not in the context of crypto) And while this is true in theory, the reality as far as I can tell is that we already have a system of no accountability - for a certain privileged sub-group of society. All crypto does is to level the field, and that's a big net win in my book. Now if panama and paradise papers had lead to anything other than journalists getting killed, trillion dollar corporations didn't keep buying up and stifling competition, insider trading by CEOs and politicians wasn't rampant, politics as a whole was not a money game and celebrities and high ranking officials didn't get off scoff free for crimes that would put lesser fortunate or connected individuals behind bars for years if not decades, maybe, maybe then accountability would be a valid point. Until then I will celebrate the fact that the odds are a little more evened out now than they were before.

endisneigh 5y ago
> And while this is true in theory, the reality as far as I can tell is that we already have a system of no accountability - for a certain privileged sub-group of society. All crypto does is to level the field, and that's a big net win in my book. This isn't true at all. What you describe isn't really relevant to cryptocurrency. You might as well advocate for the abolition of taxation to "even the playing field." The resulting societal disaster be darned.
- MildlySerious 5y ago
  > You might as well advocate for the abolition of taxation to "even the playing field." The resulting societal disaster be darned. No, not at all. Taxation is another broken system that needs to be fixed, not abolished. Voting has proven to do nothing. The act of protesting has done little, and continues to be attacked with nonsense bills. All that's left is what everyone has been repeating for the past five decades: To vote with our money. Now people are creating ways to remove their money from systems that are controlled by regulators that continue to disappoint. It's a consequence more than it is anything else. Obviously this, too, has its own set of drawbacks, but "societal disaster" really is not the one I'm worried about, because we're already headed that way with what he have right now.

dogman144 5y ago

The creation of a new gilded class is definitely a valid side effect in the event cryptocurrencies really do extend into a mainstream form of transaction/economic activity. what's doubly interesting is that group, especially as the early adopters are the ones with massive holdings, tend to have fairly intensely libertarian views. a potent combo of "i put my money where my mouth is" and "i was right" and "none of you believed me" is sure to be present in some ultra-wealth people. the primitives i'd push back on is this though, are these not the anthesis to democracy as well as you've defined it? - inflation hits the poorest classes the hardest re: devaluing their largely all-cash savings, and they have no accountability measures to change that. who will they call, the fed? their senators who approved the fed chair? - how do consensus algorithms and the open source nature of cryptocurrencies factor into your judgement? provide provide a visible way for anyone to audit and approve of (via participation in) a currency system of their choice. that's a strong feedback loop.

endisneigh 5y ago
> - inflation hits the poorest classes the hardest re: devaluing their largely all-cash savings, and they have no accountability measures to change that. who will they call, the fed? their senators who approved the fed chair? Inflation generally hurts the middle-class the most. Poor people generally don't have savings and are debtors. Debtors benefit from inflation. Cryptocurrency being open source isn't really relevant to my point. To your first point, the current views of holders isn't relevant as personalities are certainly not immutable, and as well all know, power corrupts.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  There isn’t going to be a middle class left to hurt anyway.
- reedjosh 5y ago
  > Inflation generally hurts the middle-class the most. The middle class typically has a mortgage and student loan debt for which inflation benefits them. The closer you are to the spiket, the more debt based inflation benefits you. The poor do lose the most.

agumonkey 5y ago

good luck trying to instill that in the mind of people in crypto a lot of them are naively thinking "crypto will become the new world, i believe in it, it's obvious, we have to do it, we have to free the people from <bad past>"

RandomLensman 5y ago

Their power can be easily removed by larger state actors, not an issue at all. Just imagine the compute power a few 100 billion $ could unleash. And, of course, there is traditional direct action (from stopping all legal uses/on and off ramps all the way to violence).

chroem- 5y ago

> Fundamentally it's the antithesis to democracy. What is this even supposed to mean? Strict state controls on economic activity are more within the realm of authoritarian regimes, rather than democracies.

shkkmo 5y ago
Democracies depends on transparency, accountability and the rule of law. Cyrptocurrencies are fundementally more anarchic than democratic.
- Bokkuren 5y ago
  Hmm... They are anarchic in theory but in practice there's a strong hierarchy - few rich guys control the majority of coins.
- chroem- 5y ago
  Democracy is primarily about representation and individual freedom. "Rule of law" is one of the main selling points of authoritarian ideologies. Are you sure you didn't drop a minus sign somewhere?
  - imtringued 5y ago
    I prefer laws over guns.
    - reedjosh 5y ago
      Laws are enforced with guns.
      - gfodor 5y ago
        Except in crypto.
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    Authoritarian regimes don't have "rule of law". The entire point is that all institutions in an Authoritarian country are under the control of the authoritarian leader/party. If the judicial system has independent power and can hold the rulers accountable when the violate the law, it isn't an authoritarian regime. This is precisely why the US has a system of checks and balances and why the judicial system is an important part of that.

DantesKite 5y ago

Agreed. I like to make this joke often: What's the difference between communism and bitcoin? Communism has actually been tried in practice.

philwelch 5y ago
With bitcoin, you can get things the government doesn't want you to have. With communism, you can't even get things the government does want you to have.

coralreef 5y ago

> The fundamental political issue with cryptocurrency is now you've created some amorphous group of oligarchs whose power cannot be really removed by traditional means. It's just a regression. That's an interesting way of describing open source software, whose existence depends on nodes willingly adopting and agreeing to a set of protocols. I'm guessing its far easier to fork a chain and convince people to join a new network, than it is to overthrow a central bank/government.

tomComb 5y ago
It's not about the software, it's about the currency and the people who own it.
- coralreef 5y ago
  By "own" it, does that mean speculators who have coin in wallets, or the open source maintainers whom have influence, or both? Either way, the only way a coin or chain has value is by people participating in it, whether that's buying, transacting, mining, hosting nodes, or developing. In fact, the system is so open to competition, you can fork a chain and take all its existing data to support your new network. You can't do that with Facebook, Uber, or Paypal.

hackingforfun 5y ago

> Fundamentally it's the antithesis to democracy. No one is forced to use crypto. No one is forced to mine it. No one is forced to use it at all. Is this not democratic? The users choose whether they want to use it, miners choose whether to mine it, and the "lack of accountability" you suggest, I just don't agree with at all. Crypto removes the need for government fiat. There is no need for a central authority any more over money supply. If you don't like it, fork it, or create a new crypto, and market it. See if it catches on. The democracy of the people will decide whether to use it or not. Some cryptos also have voting / governance rights, so the users can democratically vote on protocols, directly. In comparison, if I want a law to change at the federal level in the US, first of all there has to be a bill created in support of it (which I have almost zero control over), and then I can call my senator and ask that they support that bill. At that point they can choose to listen or not. I assume they will just do whatever is in their interest to stay in power and support their friends in government that supported them before, not to mention the lobbyists. Even my vote for president in the US in the end is decided by the electoral college, not by the popular vote. How is all of that democratic? I understand the energy concerns with crypto, but since you are figuring in a zero carbon footprint, I disagree and think you completely miss the benefits that crypto offers over existing systems. In the end, time will tell and I think there's almost no way that blockchain and crypto won't play a major part in future economies and governance.

mavhc 5y ago
Only reason people jump on cryptocurrencies is their pyramid scheme type nature, get in first or lose out. They're not currencies, they're speculation. People want to spend currencies, why would you ever spend bitcoin when it's designed to always increase in value? Governments are their citizens, they're just people we picked. If you hate the people that are running, there's a built in solution, get someone better to run. That's the fundamental part of democracy, anyone can run for office. Why is a central control over money supply bad? Lets you attempt to control the boom/bust cycle.
- lottin 5y ago
  The idea that a product (e.g. bitcoin) can be designed in such a way as to always increase in price has to be dismissed as crackpottery.

brightball 5y ago

On one hand, I agree with you. On the other hand, mistakes made at the federal level are virtually impossible to reverse. Every new change becomes a new layer that’s harder and harder to pull back and fix.

philwelch 5y ago

> The fundamental political issue with cryptocurrency is now you've created some amorphous group of oligarchs whose power cannot be really removed by traditional means. It's just a regression. If you're worried about currency falling under the control of an unaccountable group of oligarchs who can't easily be removed, I have some bad news for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Board_of_Governors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Board_of_Gover... The most traditional means of removing oligarchs is for an angry mob to murder them and their entire families. Does cryptocurrency prevent that? Maybe if you don't know who the oligarchs are. But cryptocurrency also doesn't really require that, either. A currency is only valuable when enough people believe that it is valuable. If there's an actual problem with a particular coin, people can switch coins--which they can't with fiat. Oligarchs, or at least powerful elites, are more or less a human universal in cultures of a sufficient size and complexity. The main difference with democracy is that democracy makes it far easier to gain power through demagoguery and propaganda. > Even if what I'm saying doesn't come to be, at a minimum you've introduced yet another layer to our financial systems for no benefit - our current system isn't here by accident. It's here due to learnings - learnings about human nature, markets, and so forth. To what ends? Among other things, fiat currency makes individual human beings more governable. Cryptocurrency makes individual human beings less governable. The more governable the private individual becomes, the easier it becomes for an oligarchy to oppress him.

endisneigh 5y ago
> If you're worried about currency falling under the control of an unaccountable group of oligarchs who can't easily be removed, I have some bad news for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Board_of_Gover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Board_of_Gover... These are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, both of which are elected by people democratically. In addition if any of them were particularly egregious, a motivated populace could amend the constitution via no representatives and kick them out anyway. So...
- philwelch 5y ago
  > These are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, both of which are elected by people democratically. Do you know a single person who, in their entire lives, has ever voted for either their President or their Senator primarily on the basis of Federal Reserve Board appointments? Most voters don't even know the constitutional duties of the President. Presidential candidates are (mostly) front men for unaccountable groups of oligarchs who can't easily be removed.

thehappypm 5y ago

Our democratic leaders killed the gold standard. We decided gold wasn't the best currency instrument. A decentralized currency system doesn't have such democratic flexibility.

Trias11 5y ago

>>> our current system isn't here by accident And dinasaurs weren't on earth by accident. They were part of evolution and then replaced with other species more appropriate for evolving earth and conditions.

imtringued 5y ago
Bitcoin is just the gold standard but worse. With gold you can at least dig up more of it as your economy grows. Bitcoin doesn't care about the real economy.
- md2020 5y ago
  What? There’s a finite supply of gold just like there’s a finite supply of Bitcoin. You can mine more Bitcoin just like you can dig up more gold, up until there’s no more to be mined.
- cwkoss 5y ago
  The idea that bitcoin should be the sole currency for a nation is silly and only promoted by shallow-thinking "to the moon" bulls. Bitcoin (if successful) will serve as an international safe haven from reckless monetary policy. It counterbalances fiat, it doesn't replace it.
- Trias11 5y ago
  Buy some gold coins and then try to move it across the borders. 1. You need to fill-in paperwork and be on a mercy of a local DHS official to be allowed. At any time regulation will and can change without you knowing about it. 2. Try to move it without paperwork and risk losing it all 3. Try to store it in the bank and risk of government/bank/courts to lock you out of your gold savings. 4. Try to store it on your own and risk losing it all to crime. 5. Entering another country - same risks with their customs as above. 6. Moving bitcoin across borders is a bit easier

MelonTree 5y ago

100 years ago, you would've used the same argument to try ban cars. They're fundamentally antithetical to democracy, as they allow anyone to .. commit crimes and get away with it.

NoGravitas 5y ago
Banning cars 100 years ago would, in retrospect, have clearly been the correct decision.

keymone 5y ago

Lol look at this dude thinking oligarchs didn’t exist before cryptocurrencies. It’s not any form of store of wealth that perpetuates the oligarchies, it’s unwillingness and corruptibility of political class that allows them to exist. Half of fucking london is owned by oligarchs as an investment haven, so until you publicly come out in support of demolishing that atrocity, don’t even utter a sound against cryptocurrencies, that just makes you a laughable hypocrite. Not to mention that store of wealth is completely orthogonal to political systems and free access to store of wealth and transaction system that isn’t fuckedup-able by “government” should be basic human right.

spinny 5y ago

> Fundamentally it's the antithesis to democracy. Really? A small group of people controlling the money supply is democracy to you?? What do you see as democratic in the fiat money system? > The fundamental political issue with cryptocurrency is now you've created some amorphous group of oligarchs whose power cannot be really removed by traditional means. It's just a regression. Instead there is some amorphous group of oligarchs whose power can be removed by force. This is an issue to me. When people talk about "removal of power" always sound authoritarian. I assume that you are ok with Jack Ma "vanishing" for some months after saying the wrong thing? > yet another layer to our financial systems for no benefit Not another layer added to the current system, but a new system > It's here due to learnings - learnings about human nature, markets, and so forth. Agree. It's also outdated. At some point in time rai/fei stones were good enough for the yap people. Many of the defi apps are built with knowledge from the centralized finance world. It's an evolution. It doesn't look like it now because we are still at a very early stage.

arcticbull 5y ago
> A small group of people controlling the money supply is democracy to you?? What do you see as democratic in the fiat money system? Absolutely. The current monetary system is controlled by the people. The Fed was created by an act of congress and continues to operate at the whim of Congress. Its mandate is to maintain a low, fixed rate of inflation and maximum employment - while being at arms length of the executive itself to provide predictability and stability across administrations. The ruling class of Bitcoiners act to manipulate the price both up and down for their own personal gain. [edit] Doge co-creator Jackson Palmer's analysis is spot on. [1] [1] https://twitter.com/ummjackson/status/1415353984617914370?s=20 https://twitter.com/ummjackson/status/1415353984617914370?s=...
- arcticbull 5y ago
  > After years of studying it, I believe that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology built primarily to amplify the wealth of its proponents through a combination of tax avoidance, diminished regulatory oversight and artificially enforced scarcity. [1]

iskander 5y ago

Personally, if not for the real world resource usage, I would be extremely supportive of cryptocurrencies replacing the traditional financial system for reasons that overlap with your reasons for opposing crypto. Essentially, the financial sector has succeeded so wildly in regulatory capture that we have lost any semblance of democratic control over banks and are unable to dispense punitive consequences for large scale criminal behavior in finance. There have still been no consequences for large banks issuing known bad mortgages in the early 2000s and then reselling those mortgages in bundles with artificially inflated default rate claims. This "trick" was deployed by most major banks and lead to disastrous consequences for people far removed from finance. Having a route to opt out of traditional finance for e.g. savings accounts, loans, and basic investments, feels like it actually improves the health of our democracy.

endisneigh 5y ago
Wouldn't the solution be to educate people and get more people to participate in our democracy? Why do you think cryptocurrencies are better?
- openfuture 5y ago
  Any "solution" that rests on "educating people" is not going to work. What works is incentives and design that makes it hard to misuse or obvious how to use.
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    > Any "solution" that rests on "educating people" is not going to work. This is not true at all, lol. How do you think modern civilization came to be?
    - openfuture 5y ago
      Man, I think our premises are incompatible, I view "civilization" as regression and arrogance (read the Wikipedia intro or dictionary definition and tell me otherwise). It doesn't solve anything for anyone, it's just an effective system of slavery.

glerk 5y ago

> Fundamentally it's the antithesis to democracy. Good. I never consented to capital controls, property confiscation, drug laws and all the other blessings that “democracy” has bestowed on me. Finally there might be a path to opting out.

endisneigh 5y ago
hey, I appreciate your honesty - though if you care about those things, you should become more engaged politically.
- dorgo 5y ago
  maybe getting involved in a crypto project is political engagement.
arcticbull 5y ago
> Good. I never consented to capital controls, property confiscation, drug laws and all the other blessings that “democracy” has bestowed on me. Finally there might be a path to opting out. And none of that has anything whatsoever to do with monetary policy. This is a quixotic quest.

thesausageking 5y ago

No one elected the Fed and they print USD like crazy. They're now proposing to print more money to solve climate change. That's the opposite of democracy. Bitcoin is a transparent, simple currency. There will only ever be 21m Bitcoins and how they're minted is defined up front and everyone knows.

joe_the_user 5y ago
No one elected the Fed and they print USD like crazy. The Fed is combination of officials appointed by elected representatives and official of banks, with appointed officials having something of the lead. Representative democracy involves things like this. They're now proposing to print more money to solve climate change. That's the opposite of democracy. The printing of money here is effectively a tax. Taxing the population and using the revenues for programs to benefit people is how a state works (in this case, a (slightly) democratic state). If anything, it seems you're proposing the wealthy not be subject to taxes oriented towards to common good, which is what the gp was (correctly imo) upset about. The only thing here is you're calling the power of the wealthy "democracy".
- thesausageking 5y ago
  Printing money functions like a tax, but it's not a tax. It was never proposed and debated by congress and then passed. > If anything, it seems you're proposing the wealthy not be subject to taxes oriented towards to common good, which is what the op was (correctly imo) upset about. I'm proposing the opposite. The money printing since 1971 has been one of the major drivers of inequality. If you own a lot of assets like stocks and real estate the last year and half of printing dollars has been tremendously good for you. If you work for a living and your income is mainly your salary, it hasn't. Your rent has gone up while your wages and opportunities have lagged.
  - joe_the_user 5y ago
    If you own a lot of assets like stocks and real estate the last year and half of printing dollars has been tremendously good for you. If you work for a living and your income is mainly your salary, it hasn't. Your rent has gone up while your wages and opportunities have lagged. This is true. Yet somehow people expect bitcoin to change that rather than exacerbate this. It's pretty obvious that bitcoin is only going to help a select group of people. After all, if it catches on, people who own this asset will benefit and no one else will, obviously.

lrvick 5y ago

Accountability could be even easier in cryptoassets in the form of smart contracts and public ledgers. Imagine if the wallet addresses of every politician were public and we could all see every donation -and- large donations would be automatically rejected by a smart contract unless they are signed and identified by the keys of a public notary they have disclosed their identity to. (There is already one public Notary in Washington that can certify identity with their registered RSA key as a form of seal) Cryptoassets can allow us to write our financial laws into code so we don't have to rely on the honor system as much.

hackingforfun 5y ago
I love this idea! But there's no way politicians are going to vote for it. This points to part of the problem, that politicians are first and foremost for themselves, not for their people.

majortennis 5y ago

it's a good hedge against inflation. A block chain can be fully accountable

sktrdie 5y ago

I don't understand this. The whole point of the p2p system is that you vote with the software you have installed. If people want to remove oligarchs that control the system they can simply move to a different kind of software, leaving the oligarchs with little or no value of their coins. In fact that was the whole selling point for me of cryptocurrencies. Anybody can join and shape the system by agreeing on the type of software and creating a system that can be easily shaped (through software) instead of a system that is quite hard to shape (current financial system).