7 ms·

> The US government was just absolutely not going to let Facebook do a private currency, backed by a basket mostly of foreign currencies, at worldwide scale. H

> The US government was just absolutely not going to let Facebook do a private currency, backed by a basket mostly of foreign currencies, at worldwide scale. How does this affect the rest of Crypto, because I suspect that governments around the world can shutdown Bitcoin and others any time they want. Given that fact, I'm wondering why other crypto currencies are being tolerated.

c01n 5y ago
Bitcoin is decentralized, Diem was centralized. It is hard to shutdown decentralized networks. Hollywood still cant shutdown bitorrent/piratebay.
- oneoff786 5y ago
  You can’t get rid of Bitcoin, but if you make it illegal for retailers to accept Bitcoin and for currency exchanges like Coinbase to operate its pretty much taken care of.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - celticninja 5y ago
    The time for that has passed, you have Coinbase listed on the NASDAQ, you dont just make something like that illegal overnight. As I said the ship has sailed, squashing it is harder now that crypto firms can hire their own lobbysists
    - oneoff786 5y ago
      Sure you can. Executive order. Boom.
      - zonethundery 5y ago
        That's not how executive orders work.
        dsr_ 5y ago
        It almost is, actually. The power of an executive order to control the behavior of the executive branch is untestedly unlimited. Part one would be a note of the laws establishing the Treasury Department's mandate to regulate financial instruments. Part two would be a finding that cryptocurrencies are harmful to the interests of the USA. Part three would be an order to the Secretary of the Treasury to determine what businesses are involved in cryptocurrencies, and to take the following sanctions: ... prohibit any transfers of credit or payments between financial institutions, or by, through, or to any financial institution, to the extent that such transfers or payments are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and involve any interest of the sanctioned business; prohibit any United States financial institution from making loans or providing credit to the sanctioned business; (iv) prohibit any transactions in foreign exchange that are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and in which the sanctioned business has any interest; (v) prohibit any United States person from investing in or purchasing significant amounts of equity or debt instruments of the sanctioned business; Form and specific sanctions taken from EO 2021-27505, from December 17 2021.
        Spivak 5y ago
        This is why purely from a "theory of governance" standpoint I find it crazy that Congress is even allowed to establish agencies in another branch that wields power reserved for them.
        nybble41 5y ago
        > The power of an executive order to control the behavior of the executive branch is untestedly unlimited. "Untestedly" being the important part. There is no practical limit on the orders that can be issued but actually enforcing those rules on anyone outside the executive branch is a different matter. Also, you skipped over the parts of EO 2021-27505 where (a) it required declaring a (rather dubious IMHO) state of emergency, (b) the sanctions were previously authorized by Congress in the Fentanyl Sanctions Act, and (c) all the sanctions applied to "foreign persons", not citizens. There is no state of emergency, sanctions were not authorized by Congress, and you want to sanctions citizens of the United States and locally-owned businesses.
    - echelon 5y ago
      Remember prohibition? The minute the fed considers Bitcoin and crypto to be a risk, they'll axe it. Coinbase or not. I think the CIA likes having Bitcoin as a means for foreign nationals to exfiltrate money. That's harder to do now in certain countries, but still possible. And the FBI likes being able to watch where the money flows.
      - cdiddy2 5y ago
        I am fairly sure there would be constitutional issues with banning it. After all its just some characters/a string. We went through a lot of this with the cryptography wars in the 90s
        Spivak 5y ago
        Something something color of your bits. And even if you somehow managed to convince someone that a digital asset was speech you still have to contend that commercial speech isn't as protected.
        AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
        The law is not a computer system. Illegal numbers[0] are a thing. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number
        oconnore 5y ago
        Bitcoin clearly qualifies as "interstate commerce".
        oneoff786 5y ago
        Even if that were true, the government need only block the exchanges which are a financial service.
      - AlexanderTheGr8 5y ago
        Not 100% sure but tornado cash means that FBI can't really watch where the money flows (if the criminals are smart enough to use tornado cash)
    - newaccount2021 5y ago
    - Zerverus 5y ago
      Let’s force Meta to give up WhatsApp…..
- rtpg 5y ago
  Bitcoin would be a lot less interesting to its proponents if it were to become illegal to interact with the network and every "legitimate business" suddenly can't operate in the US anymore. Not to mention that it would be extremely easy for the FBI to just, like, find miners and tell them to shut stuff down (at least US miners). A coordinated worldwide effort and bitcoin dissapears overnight.
  - c01n 5y ago
    As soon as one miner goes down another one will come up because it is profitable, yes maybe they can stop it in the US, but at this point the network effect and momentum is too strong, allot of money is invested in it. The FBI would have to trap over so many people and entities around the world to stop it. I think the only way to stop bitcoin is economically, like say Satoshi appears destabilizing the market.
    - ed_elliott_asc 5y ago
      Why would satoshi appearing destabilise the market and destroy it? Something I’m obviously missing!
      - mandelbrotwurst 5y ago
        There are a large number of BTC that have not moved since its early days which are largely believed to be / have been controlled by Satoshi, and if they were to move now, there would most likely be some sort of at least temporary price shock because market participants have been largely assuming that they will never move.
      - latchkey 5y ago
        "Satoshi" is missing and that is part of the allure of BTC since it started from nothing. No premine, no vc investment, no corporate backing. That said, there is an early wallet that is attributed to Satoshi with a giant amount of early mined BTC in it. If it ever moves, people will flip out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto "Nakamoto owns between 750,000 and 1,100,000 bitcoin. As of November 2021, that puts his net worth at up to 73 billion US dollars, which would make him the 15th richest person in the world.[21]"
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Maybe Big Media can't make bittorent and piratebay go away entirely, but they've put one hell of a dent in the whole ecosystem of piracy. Used to be I could use Covenant[2] on Kodi[0] and stream anything for free, in a multitude of languages and formats, with downloadable subs if desired. It was a golden age, and it is gone now. Similarly, I've watched several retro-game preservation communities[1] I've been a part of disappear mysteriously overnight. Certain sets are still very difficult to find on public trackers and the private ones are difficult to get into. In other words, they may not be able to eliminate it but they can make it very inconvenient. [0] Yes, I know this isn't backed by bittorrent. [1] Backed by bittorrent but having little to do with Hollywood. [2] Actually I guess Exodus was first. I always forget which one was the fork.
  - malfist 5y ago
    I don't think Hollywood or "Big Media" killed the torrent scene. I think netflix and hulu and other services that make it cheap and easy to access the content you want. They provide a "good enough" service to give people what they want, so people aren't going to invest the time to learn how to torrent safely.
  - toyg 5y ago
    > In other words, they may not be able to eliminate it but they can make it very inconvenient In the end, it _is_ still illegal activity, where being "inconvenient" is typically par for the course.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      Yeah, that's my point though: Even if states can't stop BTC from operating entirely, they can make it so inconvenient that it is basically useless for most people.
      - mullingitover 5y ago
        > they can make it so inconvenient that it is basically useless for most people. BTC does a perfectly good job of this on its own, no state intervention needed.
- nivenkos 5y ago
  Coinbase is centralised, Kraken is centralised.
- SahAssar 5y ago
  Do you think piratebay is decentralized? If so could you explain why/how?
davidgerard 5y ago
The US is super reluctant to shut down anything that looks like a business. It's a capitalist country, they love people going out and making money, especially in finance. But one thing the US is regulating is money laundering - the US sanctions regime is super-important. So FinCEN in the US and FATF internationally are tightening traceability on the crypto system, wherever it interfaces to actual money. 'Cos they might not be able to stop bitcoin trades, but the interface to actual money is entirely in their purview. The one thing the US couldn't tolerate about Libra was that Facebook was trying to mess with the money, at systemic scale - and doing so incompetently, which was probably a worse failing. Regulators and legislators had Libra's number immediately - they knew this species of dumbassery, and they knew that these bitcoin-VC bros were absolutely stupid and arrogant enough to do another 2008 financial crisis all by themselves.
- bathory 5y ago
  Then why did the US gov. go after the people from Liberty Reserve? I understand that the whole concept of committing crime was a bit clearer in LR than it is in Tether, but Tether sounds like what LR would have been, after they learned from their mistakes?
fleddr 5y ago
Governments cannot shutdown Bitcoin as a protocol. They could ban the mining and ownership of it. This doesn't at all stop the protocol from operating, but institutional investors and most retail would abandon it, crashing the prize. None of this will happen, as governments aren't this united. Even within the US there's crypto-friendly and crypto-hostile states. Right now, Bitcoin is explicitly recognized as an asset/commodity, not as a currency. Property, not a security. There's definitely regulation pending regarding crypto. In particular, many non-Bitcoin cryptos are likely securities. Stablecoins backings are to be regulated. And there may be mining regulation where it's not outright banned, but (CO2) taxed.
- archontes 5y ago
  You don't think there's a first amendment argument for mining bitcoin? Could the government legally restrict me from solving a math problem? If mitigating the CO2 produced by using some energy isn't priced into that energy, that's the fix. We absolutely need to incorporate externalities into prices.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > You don't think there's a first amendment argument for mining bitcoin? No, in the same way there isn’t for money laundering or wire fraud.
  - mminer237 5y ago
    Yes, of course the government can outlaw solving certain math problems. Anything on a computer can be represented by math. "Solving a math problem" can create Bitcoins or hack a computer system or recreate CSAM or recreate copyrighted or patented works or send a threat to someone. Calculating a hash for Bitcoin and then broadcasting it assumedly has the same level of First Amendment protection as calculating a hash for someone else's password and then broadcasting it.
- rvz 5y ago
  > There's definitely regulation pending regarding crypto. In particular, many non-Bitcoin cryptos are likely securities. Stablecoins backings are to be regulated. And there may be mining regulation where it's not outright banned, but (CO2) taxed. They can 'regulate' it by banning Proof-of-Work mining for 'climate change' reasons and then it will be outlawed or heavily taxed, just like in China, Kosovo, Kazakhstan and possibly Russia. Sure, Bitcoin (and any other cryptocurrencies) can't be totally 'banned', but enough to discourage mining and using PoW cryptocurrencies via legislation or taxes.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
koonsolo 5y ago
> I suspect that governments around the world can shutdown Bitcoin and others any time they want Yes, just as they can shut down movie downloads on BitTorrent.

c01n 5y ago

Bitcoin is decentralized, Diem was centralized. It is hard to shutdown decentralized networks. Hollywood still cant shutdown bitorrent/piratebay.

oneoff786 5y ago
You can’t get rid of Bitcoin, but if you make it illegal for retailers to accept Bitcoin and for currency exchanges like Coinbase to operate its pretty much taken care of.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- celticninja 5y ago
  The time for that has passed, you have Coinbase listed on the NASDAQ, you dont just make something like that illegal overnight. As I said the ship has sailed, squashing it is harder now that crypto firms can hire their own lobbysists
  - oneoff786 5y ago
    Sure you can. Executive order. Boom.
    - zonethundery 5y ago
      That's not how executive orders work.
      - dsr_ 5y ago
        It almost is, actually. The power of an executive order to control the behavior of the executive branch is untestedly unlimited. Part one would be a note of the laws establishing the Treasury Department's mandate to regulate financial instruments. Part two would be a finding that cryptocurrencies are harmful to the interests of the USA. Part three would be an order to the Secretary of the Treasury to determine what businesses are involved in cryptocurrencies, and to take the following sanctions: ... prohibit any transfers of credit or payments between financial institutions, or by, through, or to any financial institution, to the extent that such transfers or payments are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and involve any interest of the sanctioned business; prohibit any United States financial institution from making loans or providing credit to the sanctioned business; (iv) prohibit any transactions in foreign exchange that are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and in which the sanctioned business has any interest; (v) prohibit any United States person from investing in or purchasing significant amounts of equity or debt instruments of the sanctioned business; Form and specific sanctions taken from EO 2021-27505, from December 17 2021.
        Spivak 5y ago
        This is why purely from a "theory of governance" standpoint I find it crazy that Congress is even allowed to establish agencies in another branch that wields power reserved for them.
        nybble41 5y ago
        > The power of an executive order to control the behavior of the executive branch is untestedly unlimited. "Untestedly" being the important part. There is no practical limit on the orders that can be issued but actually enforcing those rules on anyone outside the executive branch is a different matter. Also, you skipped over the parts of EO 2021-27505 where (a) it required declaring a (rather dubious IMHO) state of emergency, (b) the sanctions were previously authorized by Congress in the Fentanyl Sanctions Act, and (c) all the sanctions applied to "foreign persons", not citizens. There is no state of emergency, sanctions were not authorized by Congress, and you want to sanctions citizens of the United States and locally-owned businesses.
  - echelon 5y ago
    Remember prohibition? The minute the fed considers Bitcoin and crypto to be a risk, they'll axe it. Coinbase or not. I think the CIA likes having Bitcoin as a means for foreign nationals to exfiltrate money. That's harder to do now in certain countries, but still possible. And the FBI likes being able to watch where the money flows.
    - cdiddy2 5y ago
      I am fairly sure there would be constitutional issues with banning it. After all its just some characters/a string. We went through a lot of this with the cryptography wars in the 90s
      - Spivak 5y ago
        Something something color of your bits. And even if you somehow managed to convince someone that a digital asset was speech you still have to contend that commercial speech isn't as protected.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
        The law is not a computer system. Illegal numbers[0] are a thing. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number
      - oconnore 5y ago
        Bitcoin clearly qualifies as "interstate commerce".
      - oneoff786 5y ago
        Even if that were true, the government need only block the exchanges which are a financial service.
    - AlexanderTheGr8 5y ago
      Not 100% sure but tornado cash means that FBI can't really watch where the money flows (if the criminals are smart enough to use tornado cash)
  - newaccount2021 5y ago
  - Zerverus 5y ago
    Let’s force Meta to give up WhatsApp…..
rtpg 5y ago
Bitcoin would be a lot less interesting to its proponents if it were to become illegal to interact with the network and every "legitimate business" suddenly can't operate in the US anymore. Not to mention that it would be extremely easy for the FBI to just, like, find miners and tell them to shut stuff down (at least US miners). A coordinated worldwide effort and bitcoin dissapears overnight.
- c01n 5y ago
  As soon as one miner goes down another one will come up because it is profitable, yes maybe they can stop it in the US, but at this point the network effect and momentum is too strong, allot of money is invested in it. The FBI would have to trap over so many people and entities around the world to stop it. I think the only way to stop bitcoin is economically, like say Satoshi appears destabilizing the market.
  - ed_elliott_asc 5y ago
    Why would satoshi appearing destabilise the market and destroy it? Something I’m obviously missing!
    - mandelbrotwurst 5y ago
      There are a large number of BTC that have not moved since its early days which are largely believed to be / have been controlled by Satoshi, and if they were to move now, there would most likely be some sort of at least temporary price shock because market participants have been largely assuming that they will never move.
    - latchkey 5y ago
      "Satoshi" is missing and that is part of the allure of BTC since it started from nothing. No premine, no vc investment, no corporate backing. That said, there is an early wallet that is attributed to Satoshi with a giant amount of early mined BTC in it. If it ever moves, people will flip out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto "Nakamoto owns between 750,000 and 1,100,000 bitcoin. As of November 2021, that puts his net worth at up to 73 billion US dollars, which would make him the 15th richest person in the world.[21]"
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Maybe Big Media can't make bittorent and piratebay go away entirely, but they've put one hell of a dent in the whole ecosystem of piracy. Used to be I could use Covenant[2] on Kodi[0] and stream anything for free, in a multitude of languages and formats, with downloadable subs if desired. It was a golden age, and it is gone now. Similarly, I've watched several retro-game preservation communities[1] I've been a part of disappear mysteriously overnight. Certain sets are still very difficult to find on public trackers and the private ones are difficult to get into. In other words, they may not be able to eliminate it but they can make it very inconvenient. [0] Yes, I know this isn't backed by bittorrent. [1] Backed by bittorrent but having little to do with Hollywood. [2] Actually I guess Exodus was first. I always forget which one was the fork.
- malfist 5y ago
  I don't think Hollywood or "Big Media" killed the torrent scene. I think netflix and hulu and other services that make it cheap and easy to access the content you want. They provide a "good enough" service to give people what they want, so people aren't going to invest the time to learn how to torrent safely.
- toyg 5y ago
  > In other words, they may not be able to eliminate it but they can make it very inconvenient In the end, it _is_ still illegal activity, where being "inconvenient" is typically par for the course.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    Yeah, that's my point though: Even if states can't stop BTC from operating entirely, they can make it so inconvenient that it is basically useless for most people.
    - mullingitover 5y ago
      > they can make it so inconvenient that it is basically useless for most people. BTC does a perfectly good job of this on its own, no state intervention needed.
nivenkos 5y ago
Coinbase is centralised, Kraken is centralised.
SahAssar 5y ago
Do you think piratebay is decentralized? If so could you explain why/how?

davidgerard 5y ago

The US is super reluctant to shut down anything that looks like a business. It's a capitalist country, they love people going out and making money, especially in finance. But one thing the US is regulating is money laundering - the US sanctions regime is super-important. So FinCEN in the US and FATF internationally are tightening traceability on the crypto system, wherever it interfaces to actual money. 'Cos they might not be able to stop bitcoin trades, but the interface to actual money is entirely in their purview. The one thing the US couldn't tolerate about Libra was that Facebook was trying to mess with the money, at systemic scale - and doing so incompetently, which was probably a worse failing. Regulators and legislators had Libra's number immediately - they knew this species of dumbassery, and they knew that these bitcoin-VC bros were absolutely stupid and arrogant enough to do another 2008 financial crisis all by themselves.

bathory 5y ago
Then why did the US gov. go after the people from Liberty Reserve? I understand that the whole concept of committing crime was a bit clearer in LR than it is in Tether, but Tether sounds like what LR would have been, after they learned from their mistakes?

fleddr 5y ago

Governments cannot shutdown Bitcoin as a protocol. They could ban the mining and ownership of it. This doesn't at all stop the protocol from operating, but institutional investors and most retail would abandon it, crashing the prize. None of this will happen, as governments aren't this united. Even within the US there's crypto-friendly and crypto-hostile states. Right now, Bitcoin is explicitly recognized as an asset/commodity, not as a currency. Property, not a security. There's definitely regulation pending regarding crypto. In particular, many non-Bitcoin cryptos are likely securities. Stablecoins backings are to be regulated. And there may be mining regulation where it's not outright banned, but (CO2) taxed.

archontes 5y ago
You don't think there's a first amendment argument for mining bitcoin? Could the government legally restrict me from solving a math problem? If mitigating the CO2 produced by using some energy isn't priced into that energy, that's the fix. We absolutely need to incorporate externalities into prices.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > You don't think there's a first amendment argument for mining bitcoin? No, in the same way there isn’t for money laundering or wire fraud.
- mminer237 5y ago
  Yes, of course the government can outlaw solving certain math problems. Anything on a computer can be represented by math. "Solving a math problem" can create Bitcoins or hack a computer system or recreate CSAM or recreate copyrighted or patented works or send a threat to someone. Calculating a hash for Bitcoin and then broadcasting it assumedly has the same level of First Amendment protection as calculating a hash for someone else's password and then broadcasting it.
rvz 5y ago
> There's definitely regulation pending regarding crypto. In particular, many non-Bitcoin cryptos are likely securities. Stablecoins backings are to be regulated. And there may be mining regulation where it's not outright banned, but (CO2) taxed. They can 'regulate' it by banning Proof-of-Work mining for 'climate change' reasons and then it will be outlawed or heavily taxed, just like in China, Kosovo, Kazakhstan and possibly Russia. Sure, Bitcoin (and any other cryptocurrencies) can't be totally 'banned', but enough to discourage mining and using PoW cryptocurrencies via legislation or taxes.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

koonsolo 5y ago

> I suspect that governments around the world can shutdown Bitcoin and others any time they want Yes, just as they can shut down movie downloads on BitTorrent.