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"He worries that they enable illicit activity by making money transactions less transparent." I always have to prefix that I'm no fan of crypto, don't own any,
by jacknews 4y ago
"He worries that they enable illicit activity by making money transactions less transparent."
I always have to prefix that I'm no fan of crypto, don't own any, never have, but this seems like a shill to me, and brazenly opposite to reality.
Blockchains show every transaction ever, to everyone, albeit the transactees are pseudonymous.
But the traditional system is totally opaque to most people. And even to government, when complex webs of tax-haven shell-companies are involved (unless records are leaked, as in the panama papers, etc). So billionaires, mafia groups, corrupt government, get away with all kinds shenanighans, because the transactions themselves are secret.
The complete opposite of what Stiglitz is arguing.
- ericd 4y agoLevel 2 chains don’t generally put everything back on the main chain. Lightning, for example, is peer to peer, and then only does net settlement to the main blockchain very infrequently (maybe after a couple months of transactions). This also makes it vastly more energy efficient on a per-transaction basis, the marginal energy cost of a transaction can approach zero. But also, my understanding is that the transaction history isn’t really preserved in a format that would be easy for a government to put together after the fact.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 4y agoGoing further, some L1 chains claim to be anonymous not pseudonymous. Whether that is or remains true depends on the crypto(graphy). Happy to see all this discussion on HN.