6 ms·

Let's tax stuff in proportion to the value it provides to society Since crypto is used for crime and pyramid schemes, zero value so infinite tax = ban

scottiebarnes 5y ago
By that logic, we need to ban peer to peer file sharing, encryption, and the internet at large since they are also platforms that allow for crime and pyramid schemes.
- woodruffw 5y ago
  You’ve switched the conditions for taxation here: the GP suggested value to society, not adherence to preexisting laws. One of the standard refrains when justifying internet piracy is that intellectual property is actually a net harm to society, so I don’t think the connection you’ve made follows.
  - scottiebarnes 5y ago
    Okay, what metric are we using to determine "value to society"?
    - woodruffw 5y ago
      I don’t think we have to agree on a single metric to see that running a coal-fired power plant for the sole purpose of cracking hashes has marginal, if any value to society. And that’s before we even factor in the ridiculously negative externalities manifest in digging coal out of the earth and burning it.
      - scottiebarnes 5y ago
        I think a decentralized network that is permissionless to participate in, pseudonymous and censorship resistant is very valuable to society. I think an asset that can be secured, transmitted, and stored in self custody cheaply that allows people to escape hyperinflation is quite valuable to society. I think understanding central banking and monetary policy and history of money are not strong points on HN. Everyone here understands that a memory leak causes your app to crash given enough cycles. Being able to print unlimited currency is a memory leak.
        woodruffw 5y ago
        > I think a decentralized network that is permissionless to participate in, pseudonymous and censorship resistant is very valuable to society. Any or all of these things can be true! But you're going to need to show that Bitcoin satisfies each of these conditions. Last time I checked, it's a public, immutable ledger that anybody (not just officials with warrants) can track. The senses in which the Bitcoin network is "permissionless," "pseudonymous," etc. are all adaptive (and mostly non-formalized!) properties of behavior on the Bitcoin network, each of which has spectacularly failed in well-publicized ways. > I think understanding central banking and monetary policy and history of money are not strong points on HN. Everyone here understands that a memory leak causes your app to crash given enough cycles. Being able to print unlimited currency is a memory leak. I think I understand both central banking and monetary policy well enough (as a non-CS-but-educated layperson) to not require silly computer analogies. Conspicuously absent from this analogy are deflationary spirals, one of which Bitcoin currently is in. You don't need to be an economist to understand that the defining property of currency is its ability to provide liquidity to transactions (i.e., serve as a medium of exchange); deflationary assets are famously poor mediums of exchange.
        scottiebarnes 5y ago
        > The senses in which the Bitcoin network is "permissionless," "pseudonymous," etc. are all adaptive (and mostly non-formalized!) properties of behavior on the Bitcoin network, each of which has spectacularly failed in well-publicized ways. In a closed system, all you see are public keys sending/receiving from other keys. If you want to identify or censor a person or their transaction, you need external information linking them to a particular address. New addresses can be created on the fly simply by creating a new wallet, which is software that can be run on any device anywhere in the world, thanks to open source code. > Conspicuously absent from this analogy are deflationary spirals, one of which Bitcoin currently is in. You don't need to be an economist to understand that the defining property of currency is its ability to provide liquidity to transactions (i.e., serve as a medium of exchange); deflationary assets are famously poor mediums of exchange. I don't know how deflation plays out with Bitcoin, no one does. But in 100 years if we want to change it, we can, because its an open source protocol that can be forked and forced to compete with other ideas.
      - ben_w 5y ago
        Eh, I’ve had responses from pro-crypto people to the effect that the cost is the point, those particular individuals seem to believe that is both a necessary and a sufficient way of making the thing secure and useful. I was unable to convince them to the contrary on either regard, the necessity nor the sufficiency, despite the existence of all the currencies that work even better without PoW/PoS.
        woodruffw 5y ago
        That's the wonderful(?) thing about profit motive: Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) are making a handful of people ludicrous amounts of money, and it's easy to ignore just about anything that falls out of that as long as the gears keep turning. When people succumb to that kind of profit motive, it becomes our responsibility as disinterested outsiders to make a non-compromised evaluation of the state of affairs. That's the evaluation I'm interested in.
ben_w 5y ago
I understand the logic, but I think it’s probably better to just focus on enforcement against scam perpetrators regardless of the mechanism they use (I remember seeing a lot of pyramid scheme scams back in the internet of the late 90s). I think cryptocurrency is broken in a lot of other ways and may even in in a solarpunk future need to be banned in order to stop a hash-rate arms race disassembling the plane into a Dyson swarm, but even then it’s best to focus on the principles behind the problem rather than the specific technology.
md2020 5y ago
I highly value a world where free expression isn’t effectively curtailed by private payment processors acting as censors on behalf of governments. Governments change, and it’s only a matter of time until this is used against you and people you agree with, if it hasn’t been already.
abruzzi 5y ago
while I don't necessarily agree with the extreme negative view of crypto (though I definitely don't have a positive view), this is already a commonly practiced thing called Pigovian taxation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax

scottiebarnes 5y ago

By that logic, we need to ban peer to peer file sharing, encryption, and the internet at large since they are also platforms that allow for crime and pyramid schemes.

woodruffw 5y ago
You’ve switched the conditions for taxation here: the GP suggested value to society, not adherence to preexisting laws. One of the standard refrains when justifying internet piracy is that intellectual property is actually a net harm to society, so I don’t think the connection you’ve made follows.
- scottiebarnes 5y ago
  Okay, what metric are we using to determine "value to society"?
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    I don’t think we have to agree on a single metric to see that running a coal-fired power plant for the sole purpose of cracking hashes has marginal, if any value to society. And that’s before we even factor in the ridiculously negative externalities manifest in digging coal out of the earth and burning it.
    - scottiebarnes 5y ago
      I think a decentralized network that is permissionless to participate in, pseudonymous and censorship resistant is very valuable to society. I think an asset that can be secured, transmitted, and stored in self custody cheaply that allows people to escape hyperinflation is quite valuable to society. I think understanding central banking and monetary policy and history of money are not strong points on HN. Everyone here understands that a memory leak causes your app to crash given enough cycles. Being able to print unlimited currency is a memory leak.
      - woodruffw 5y ago
        > I think a decentralized network that is permissionless to participate in, pseudonymous and censorship resistant is very valuable to society. Any or all of these things can be true! But you're going to need to show that Bitcoin satisfies each of these conditions. Last time I checked, it's a public, immutable ledger that anybody (not just officials with warrants) can track. The senses in which the Bitcoin network is "permissionless," "pseudonymous," etc. are all adaptive (and mostly non-formalized!) properties of behavior on the Bitcoin network, each of which has spectacularly failed in well-publicized ways. > I think understanding central banking and monetary policy and history of money are not strong points on HN. Everyone here understands that a memory leak causes your app to crash given enough cycles. Being able to print unlimited currency is a memory leak. I think I understand both central banking and monetary policy well enough (as a non-CS-but-educated layperson) to not require silly computer analogies. Conspicuously absent from this analogy are deflationary spirals, one of which Bitcoin currently is in. You don't need to be an economist to understand that the defining property of currency is its ability to provide liquidity to transactions (i.e., serve as a medium of exchange); deflationary assets are famously poor mediums of exchange.
        scottiebarnes 5y ago
        > The senses in which the Bitcoin network is "permissionless," "pseudonymous," etc. are all adaptive (and mostly non-formalized!) properties of behavior on the Bitcoin network, each of which has spectacularly failed in well-publicized ways. In a closed system, all you see are public keys sending/receiving from other keys. If you want to identify or censor a person or their transaction, you need external information linking them to a particular address. New addresses can be created on the fly simply by creating a new wallet, which is software that can be run on any device anywhere in the world, thanks to open source code. > Conspicuously absent from this analogy are deflationary spirals, one of which Bitcoin currently is in. You don't need to be an economist to understand that the defining property of currency is its ability to provide liquidity to transactions (i.e., serve as a medium of exchange); deflationary assets are famously poor mediums of exchange. I don't know how deflation plays out with Bitcoin, no one does. But in 100 years if we want to change it, we can, because its an open source protocol that can be forked and forced to compete with other ideas.
    - ben_w 5y ago
      Eh, I’ve had responses from pro-crypto people to the effect that the cost is the point, those particular individuals seem to believe that is both a necessary and a sufficient way of making the thing secure and useful. I was unable to convince them to the contrary on either regard, the necessity nor the sufficiency, despite the existence of all the currencies that work even better without PoW/PoS.
      - woodruffw 5y ago
        That's the wonderful(?) thing about profit motive: Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) are making a handful of people ludicrous amounts of money, and it's easy to ignore just about anything that falls out of that as long as the gears keep turning. When people succumb to that kind of profit motive, it becomes our responsibility as disinterested outsiders to make a non-compromised evaluation of the state of affairs. That's the evaluation I'm interested in.

ben_w 5y ago

I understand the logic, but I think it’s probably better to just focus on enforcement against scam perpetrators regardless of the mechanism they use (I remember seeing a lot of pyramid scheme scams back in the internet of the late 90s). I think cryptocurrency is broken in a lot of other ways and may even in in a solarpunk future need to be banned in order to stop a hash-rate arms race disassembling the plane into a Dyson swarm, but even then it’s best to focus on the principles behind the problem rather than the specific technology.

md2020 5y ago

I highly value a world where free expression isn’t effectively curtailed by private payment processors acting as censors on behalf of governments. Governments change, and it’s only a matter of time until this is used against you and people you agree with, if it hasn’t been already.

abruzzi 5y ago

while I don't necessarily agree with the extreme negative view of crypto (though I definitely don't have a positive view), this is already a commonly practiced thing called Pigovian taxation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax