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Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy

131 points by ghuntley 4y ago

ghuntley 4y ago
Mirrored from https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1534097850640093184 https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1534097850640093184: Last week the global tech community engaged the democratic process to start a discussion with American lawmakers about responsible innovation and financial regulation concerning crypto-assets. The letter was covered widely by the global press, read by over 25,000 people and signed by over 1,400 new signatories. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/06/03/crypto-skeptics-growing/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/06/03/crypto-sk... Signatories now include folks such James Gosling, Mat Velosso, Martin Fowler, Simon Willison, David SH Rosenthal, Dave Andersen, 25 computer science professors and engineers from Amazon, ACM, Adobe, AMD, Apple, Box, Block, CMU, Cornell, Disney, Dropbox, eBay, Google, GitHub, IEEE, IBM, Microsoft, MIT, Meta, Mozilla, Pixar, Shopify, Netflix, Oracle, Stanford, Shopify, Salesforce, Thoughtworks, VMWare. Signatories are not only programming language creators, professors, and titans of industry but normal working software engineers who feel strongly about this issue and have the courage to speak up to help inform policy. https://www.ft.com/content/f4b2fa1a-4057-4b10-9f3b-efa57e6bcbac https://www.ft.com/content/f4b2fa1a-4057-4b10-9f3b-efa57e6bc... The thesis is very simple: the status quo needs to change. The most vulnerable in our communities are getting hurt because of regulatory inaction. And moving forward we need to proceed from a place of informed skepticism rather than reckless positivity. https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgmyzk/the-pivot-to-web3-is-going-to-get-people-hurt https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgmyzk/the-pivot-to-web3-is-... This is all at the same time that the crypto lobby is spending more money than the entire defense sector put together to influence senators and push their corporate interests on the public. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-02/crypto-industry-eclipses-defense-big-pharma-in-political-giving https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-02/crypto-in... A grassroots coalition of scientists, think tanks, finreg experts, and legal scholars are organizing to assist the legislative process and ensure that fintech innovation serves financial inclusion and that investors, markets, and consumers are protected. https://twitter.com/RealBankReform/status/1533820486022569984 https://twitter.com/RealBankReform/status/153382048602256998... The window to sign closes this Friday, and the letter is sent to Congress thereafter. Join the 1500+ other fellow programmers, scientists and engineers in the technology community in making your voice heard on this important issue. Read the letter at https://concerned.tech https://concerned.tech
prohobo 4y ago
"...and urge you to consider our objective and independent expert judgments to guide your legislative priorities, which we remain happy to discuss anytime." So they have no real demands, just "listen to us about crypto, and not anyone else". I'm all for responsible regulation to protect people from scams, but this is ridiculous. Signatories include every single mega tech corporation, which is an obvious development; they want to control this too.
- paulgb 4y ago
  I mean, that seems like a reasonable demand? We all know that most politicians have a shaky understanding of technology at best, and corporate lobbyists fill that information void with a narrative that advantages their employers. This is a neutral (as in not on crypto payroll) group of technologists saying “hey, we understand this stuff at a technical and/or economic level, we’re willing to talk too”. The signatures from FAANG companies are mostly rank and file engineers. I doubt their companies asked them to sign, but I think it’s representative of how widespread crypto skepticism is in tech.
  - prohobo 4y ago
    They're aren't all neutral, many of them are working on private blockchain technologies. For example, anyone working for Meta is on the crypto payroll - just not the Bitcoin/Ethereum/etc ones. My pointed questions are: 1) What are their specific concerns/demands? 2) Who specifically are politicians supposed to be listening to? 3) Why aren't the government appointed CBDC research groups already informing politicians? 4) If they are, then what is this letter about? This is about on the same level as the "Please stop people from talking about the Wuhan lab leak" letter.
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roenxi 4y ago
> We strongly disagree with the narrative — peddled by those with a financial stake in the crypto-asset industry — that these technologies represent a positive financial innovation... This is a little bit unfair. When I became convinced that cryptocurrencies represented a positive financial innovation I immediately went out and bought some. Obviously the more potential someone sees the more they will be involved. This is a legitimate never-before-in-history situation. It was impossible to get an asset with the mix of properties crypto has before around 2010. This is an exciting era.
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  - zaudo 4y ago
    Boy, that escalated quickly... Can we not critique content in submissions now?
    - DonHopkins 4y ago
      Yes, he certainly escalated to mournful self pity and casting himself as the victim then pivoted to shilling quite quickly, I agree. Of course you can critique: that's exactly what you and I are both doing right now. You don't have to ask me for permission.
  - amelius 4y ago
    Also: the enabling of ransomware and other criminal activities.
- pavlov 4y ago
  > “Obviously the more potential someone sees the more they will be involved” This sentence summarizes why crypto is so peculiar. It’s all about belief in some potential, not utility or returns. And you’re supposed to get “involved”. When you buy a stock or a bond or a derivative or a currency hedge, it doesn’t usually become a way of life. But crypto isn’t a practical financial product so much as a club membership. Bored Apes figured this out and took out the financial pretense completely.
politician 4y ago
Disappointing and misguided. It’s especially sad to see Bruce Schneier indirectly advocate for back doors.
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  "Indirectly", huh? But not actually? Exactly how is he doing that?
  - politician 4y ago
    > "The claims that the blockchain advocates make are not true," said Bruce Schneier. "It's not secure, it's not decentralised. Any system where you forget your password and you lose your life savings is not a safe system," he added. His tweet. He clearly identifies the problem as “lost password” implies disaster. This line of thinking is what the government uses to argue for back doors in cryptography software. The position he is taking leads to the argument that we need our cryptographic keys backed up by the state/corporations so that we don’t lose our life savings.
    - FabHK 4y ago
      You are conflating money and messages. It is perfectly compatible to argue, simultaneously, against cryptocurrencies, and for e2e encrypted messages.
      - politician 4y ago
        The Supreme Court of the US has determined money to be speech, so this is an unwise position to take. If you ask the government to prevent the use of cryptography in cryptocurrencies then you undermine the argument that the government should not tap or intermediate all communications. At the end of the day, a financial transaction IS a message. It’s a command to a ledger to make an adjustment.
        FabHK 4y ago
rvz 4y ago
I can only predict that both the people signing this letter and the crypto maximalists are going to be very disappointed that this will somehow be the end of all cryptocurrencies or the full adoption and dismantling of the current system with one cryptocoin being a reserve currency. An example of such is where the critics were screaming over the so-called NY bill on 'banning' of PoW [0], but it turns out that not only it doesn't affected PoS cryptocurrencies, but only affected PoW with carbon methods and not via renewable methods. As for the same letter [1] being pushed by critics like Grady Booch, ghuntley, Molly White etc al. who many here know in the industry, we would like to also know the ones who are left blank like 'Darren W. Seng' and 'Stephen Diehl' who are the most extreme and prominent names arguing against crypto. But it turns out that they seem to be connected as C-level executives and co-founders of a private blockchain startup named 'Adjoint' [2] that appears to be in direct competition with public blockchains like Bitcoin, and especially Ethereum. Again it's very strange to see why that wasn't mentioned in the first place and why it's only specifically 'public blockchains' and not all blockchains both 'public' AND 'private'? This critic [3] seems to attack both of them and doesn't see any difference to them at all. Any idea why all of that including something called 'nanocoin' was deleted and scrubbed off of the internet? Maybe cryptocurrencies like Ethereum (which has smart-contract capabilities) are the reason why the folks at Adjoint are eternally at odds with the crypto industry and are dedicated every single day to totally getting rid of all cryptocurrencies? I'm sure many have tried going down this path and Seng, and Diehl seem to have already deleted their repositories and associations [3] with the whole of Adjoint to pursuing this long utopian conquest and bringing others on board. These crypto-assets for sure will be regulated, but once again the goal of getting rid of all of them is a similar path that has been trodden by the free-software activists, anti-IoT activists, privacy activists, anti-AI activists and anti surveillance-capitalism activists etc before them and it has resulted in co-existence rather than a complete and total removal or outright total ban on what they were against. Cryptocurrencies are no different and will co-exist rather than wither away. In this latest push, at least they learnt their lesson with this failed petition in the UK [4]. [0] https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2021/A7389 https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2021/A7389 [1] https://concerned.tech https://concerned.tech [2] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/adjoint-inc https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/adjoint-inc [3] https://medium.com/@johny.codes/private-blockchains-even-worse-crypto-babble-scams-478e9c783b1b https://medium.com/@johny.codes/private-blockchains-even-wor... [4] https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/601629 https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/601629
b1n 4y ago
Bullish.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Here's a prediction: Crypto is the next cancer from cigarettes, lead in fuel, climate change etc. The thing linking them is that even after it was widely acknowledged these were a net negative, they continued for a long, long time. Harming a wide group of people uneccesarily and massively profiting a select few. If I'm correct, the key indicator will be right wing governments around the globe being paid off to allow the abuse to continue and their media going on the attack. Communist computer scientists, what do they know? They just want to keep the poor white men from getting rich because of political correctness etc. etc. Anyone seen any signs of that yet? Hope I'm wrong, worried I'm correct.
- tatertots1234 4y ago
  Proof of Work and Bitcoin may be generally trash, and unless they evolve they will eventually crash and burn, but "crypto" on the whole encompasses a wide range of good and bad applications. Here's a prediction: Over the next decade or two, scalable proof of stake crypto currency networks and blockchain-based systems will probably be used as base settlement layers for a growing portion of digital payments, disrupting VISA and PayPal and enabling new ways of sending and coordinating value online.
  - TimPC 4y ago
    This world would suck for the same reason I don’t use debit to pay for things from untrusted merchants. Credit cards provide an incredible security layer in transaction reversibility that allows you to transact with unknown merchants. Internet payments doesn’t work without it. What cryptocurrency is going to solve this problem?
    - tatertots1234 4y ago
      You realize that in many countries, credit cards are not common? People pay for things online with their debit card all the time. Not all consumers need or want transaction reversibility, especially if they trust the contracts they are using, like depositing tokens into a DEX contract address that has not changed for several years - this has an extremely low counterparty risk. A VISA- or PayPal-like reversible payment system is definitely possible to build on ETH as a rollup that takes a 1-5% fee of all transactions in order to cover cost of chargebacks. Many applications already support various forms of transaction reversal in their contracts, look at USDC.
bitcoin_anon 4y ago
Serious question for those of you who want to regulate Bitcoin out of existence: What do you propose to do with those of us who, despite your attestations of its uselessness, have deemed it useful and purchased it with our hard earned money? For example, MSTR has ~$4 billion in Bitcoin on its balance sheet. It purchased it on the free market for reasons that were valid to it. However, you disagree and want to step in and do something about it. What do you propose to do about entities like MSTR?
- arrosenberg 4y ago
  They bought a highly speculative vehicle knowing that eventual government intervention was a risk. I feel sort of bad for the little guys who get wiped out thinking it actually had value, the big funds who institutionally should know the risks can eat cake.
- cycrutchfield 4y ago
  Bankruptcy
- pmyteh 4y ago
  Most bitcoin regulation scenarios would just be an ordinary investment risk, in some senses. If you invest in commercial property and then changes in the tax treatment of real estate mean that the value of your investment falls then that just sucks for you. I can't see that it's any different if, for example, the US Government started demanding annual declarations of crypto wallets on tax returns and started taxing capital swings as income. If cryptocurrency is actually confiscated I'm sure that the US government at least will be obliged to pay out. Given the volatility of bitcoin (and the extent to which it will likely drop if governments come out full square against it) I'm sure there will be legal arguments about what the compensation for the taking should be. But if the use-case is largely either (1) speculation or (2) hiding things from governments and governments limit the upside of (1) with tax or structural changes and crack down on (2) I don't think anyone's going to make the bag-holders whole in case of regulation rather than confiscation. Bigger companies than ~$4bn have gone bankrupt by misreading their market risks before.
  - 4y ago
tatertots1234 4y ago
The letter has some good and bad. Good because it advocates for more regulation and consumer protection, and points out some obvious concerns with crypto like energy expenditure in proof of work. Bad because the letter misrepresents the technology and paints privacy as a purely criminal behavior, and suggests the entire technology sector is useless. > Similarly, most public blockchain-based financial products are a disaster for financial privacy; the exceptions are a handful of emerging privacy-focused blockchain finance alternatives, and these are a gift to money-launderers. Imagine this argument being applied to End-to-End Encryption. "Most chat messaging apps are a disaster for user privacy; except the ones that are privacy-focused and use E2EE, and those are a gift to terrorists and criminals." There's lots of privacy preserving crypto tech: Monero, ZCash, TornadoCash, and soon Aztec. zk-SNARK and zk-STARK are recent advances here that dramatically change the future landscape. You can also use CEX as a mixer to provide soft anonymity, allowing regulators and IRS to track your finances, without revealing your accounts to the whole world. > Blockchain technology cannot, and will not, have transaction reversal mechanisms because they are antithetical to its base design. This is false. There is a lot of blockchain technology that has transaction reversal mechanisms. USDC and other centralized stablecoins can freeze and mint tokens. Optimistic rollups are built around the very design of transaction reversal. Many NFT projects give the contract owner ability to mint, burn, change metadata, and so on. The original DAO itself was drained and funds reverted by a hard fork, and yet ETH and ETC still continue to exist just fine. > By its very design, blockchain technology, specifically so-called "public blockchains", are poorly suited for just about every purpose currently touted as a present or potential source of public benefit. Bah! Perhaps some of the authors would like to shill their own private blockchain companies (Adjoint Inc).
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > imagine this argument being applied to End-to-End Encryption There's a stark line between encrypted communication and encrypted money. If someone can't see the difference between those bits they shouldn't be handling other peoples' money.
  - f38zf5vdt 4y ago
ccuqui 4y ago
Sorry to say, but the petition won´t make any difference. The reason is simple: the problem is not technical, but political. Governments, worldwide, have clear goals: to become more powerful, omniscient and perpetual in power, and the basis for this is the money they hold. Crypto currencies attack precisely the money part and consequently affect the other objectives. The currency digitization movement is global (e-dollar being proposed by the FED, e-Real in Brazil, the digitization of money in India, as well as the banning of cryptocurrencies mining in several countries, claiming: * put your ecological/anti-terrorist argument here *. The truth is that governments do not tolerate the loss of control and the possibility of currency evasion that cryptocurrencies potentially allow. They also don't tolerate the possibility that when they do shit, they can't print money at will to try to cover it up. Neither do they tolerate not having control over all circulating money, especially with regard to taxation. Laws like this will continue to be passed easily, worldwide, as it maintains the status quo that governments will do everything to maintain. PS: I am PRAYING to be wrong on ALL of the above statements....
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > Neither do they tolerate not having control over all circulating money, especially with regard to taxation Plenty of countries have given up their currencies. Presently and throughout history [1][2]. In particular, your toy model of governance isn't terribly predictive of American politics. > not having control over all circulating money, especially with regard to taxation Non sequitur. I can invoice from New York in euros or Bitcoin and still pay my taxes on those earnings in dollars. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_board#Examples_in_recent_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_board#Examples_in_rec... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_union#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_union#History
- paulgb 4y ago
  > Governments, worldwide, have clear goals: to become more powerful, omniscient and perpetual in power I think it's a mistake to treat governments (especially the elected government(s) like this letter targets) as a singular, rational entity. Instead they are a collection of individual (let's generously assume) rational actors whose career goals are often at odds with each other. These career goals depend on the support of the electorate, which is why petitions can work.
generationP 4y ago
> Finally, blockchain technologies facilitate few, if any, real-economy uses. On the other hand, the underlying crypto-assets have been the vehicle for unsound and highly volatile speculative investment schemes that are being actively promoted to retail investors who may be unable to understand their nature and risk. Other significant externalities include threats to national security through money laundering and ransomware attacks, financial stability risks from high price volatility, speculation and susceptibility to run risk, massive climate emissions from the proof-of-work technology utilized by some of the most widely traded crypto-assets, and investor risk from large scale scams and other criminal financial activity. Venezuelan emigrants have been using cryptocurrencies to get cash back to their families: https://www.reuters.com/technology/venezuelas-economy-regresses-crypto-fills-gaps-2021-06-22/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/venezuelas-economy-regres... Navalny's Foundation takes BTC and ETH donations and recommends them as the safest option: https://donate.fbk.world/?utm_campaign=10MAR22_fundraising_acf_link&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter https://donate.fbk.world/?utm_campaign=10MAR22_fundraising_a... Several Ukrainian humanitarian and military fundraisers are using crypto: https://nitter.net/kamilkazani/status/1533471887958986758#m https://nitter.net/kamilkazani/status/1533471887958986758#m These are just the first three examples that come to my mind. When I see Americans crow about the uselessness of cryptocurrencies, I think of Marie Antoinette.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  More Venezuelans used Zelle with dollars than crypto. I was able to donate dollars without issue directly to the Ukrainian government. Crypto proponents trot out these edge suboptimal use cases as excuses to allow an entire global Ponzi scheme to continue, when the discussion should be “what mechanisms can be provided to support refugee value protection and transferring value to friendly nations under attack using existing fiat rails and the laws that protect users of them?” That’s not hard to do using existing systems, but crypto proponents are so wrapped up in the thought of their digital assets rapidly declining in value that it isn’t an option to them. “Crypto must be the way.” when the evidence is clear it is not. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/06/16/venezuela-is-a-testing-ground-for-digital-dollarization-and-zelle-doesnt-like-it/ https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/06/16/venezuela-is-a-t...
alaricus 4y ago
This is one of the most ridiculous things I read in a very long time. Why does it concern those 1500 people how I decide to store my money? What's next, regulating where I can spend my money and where I can't? There is nothing responsible about the government interfering in things it should not be interfering with.
- malermeister 4y ago
  > What's next, regulating where I can spend my money and where I can't? This is already a thing. See drugs, slaves etc.
baby 4y ago
Disappointing. I think technologists who also understand finance should be heard, not technologists who don’t. Where are the cryptographers on this list besides Schneier?
- zja 4y ago
  What makes you think the signatories don’t understand finance?
  - baby 4y ago
    I guess it looks like a list of random signatures to me.
bo1024 4y ago
What I find most disappointing about this is the extremely vague ask. “Do something, anything” coming from technologists? And trusting that politicians will not twist that as supporting their own agendas?
kevinpet 4y ago
Why is a letter about crypto referring to Fintech in general in the title? To me this shows a distinct lack of context and the view that these people think they know a lot about crypto, but know very little about finance and moreover the authors don't think they need to know much about finance. For example, the bald assertion that crypto has no real world use cases ignores the work happening within traditional finance to use blockchain for trade settlement. Do I know everything about these topic? No, but I'm not writing a public letter soliciting signatures. Am I a crypto shill? No, I think current crypto is a rip off, but this letter isn't a good argument for that. It's too light on details and doesn't acknowledge the areas where it could be valuable.

131 points by ghuntley 4y ago

Mirrored from https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1534097850640093184 https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1534097850640093184: Last week the global tech community engaged the democratic process to start a discussion with American lawmakers about responsible innovation and financial regulation concerning crypto-assets. The letter was covered widely by the global press, read by over 25,000 people and signed by over 1,400 new signatories. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/06/03/crypto-skeptics-growing/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/06/03/crypto-sk... Signatories now include folks such James Gosling, Mat Velosso, Martin Fowler, Simon Willison, David SH Rosenthal, Dave Andersen, 25 computer science professors and engineers from Amazon, ACM, Adobe, AMD, Apple, Box, Block, CMU, Cornell, Disney, Dropbox, eBay, Google, GitHub, IEEE, IBM, Microsoft, MIT, Meta, Mozilla, Pixar, Shopify, Netflix, Oracle, Stanford, Shopify, Salesforce, Thoughtworks, VMWare. Signatories are not only programming language creators, professors, and titans of industry but normal working software engineers who feel strongly about this issue and have the courage to speak up to help inform policy. https://www.ft.com/content/f4b2fa1a-4057-4b10-9f3b-efa57e6bcbac https://www.ft.com/content/f4b2fa1a-4057-4b10-9f3b-efa57e6bc... The thesis is very simple: the status quo needs to change. The most vulnerable in our communities are getting hurt because of regulatory inaction. And moving forward we need to proceed from a place of informed skepticism rather than reckless positivity. https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgmyzk/the-pivot-to-web3-is-going-to-get-people-hurt https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgmyzk/the-pivot-to-web3-is-... This is all at the same time that the crypto lobby is spending more money than the entire defense sector put together to influence senators and push their corporate interests on the public. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-02/crypto-industry-eclipses-defense-big-pharma-in-political-giving https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-02/crypto-in... A grassroots coalition of scientists, think tanks, finreg experts, and legal scholars are organizing to assist the legislative process and ensure that fintech innovation serves financial inclusion and that investors, markets, and consumers are protected. https://twitter.com/RealBankReform/status/1533820486022569984 https://twitter.com/RealBankReform/status/153382048602256998... The window to sign closes this Friday, and the letter is sent to Congress thereafter. Join the 1500+ other fellow programmers, scientists and engineers in the technology community in making your voice heard on this important issue. Read the letter at https://concerned.tech https://concerned.tech

prohobo 4y ago

"...and urge you to consider our objective and independent expert judgments to guide your legislative priorities, which we remain happy to discuss anytime." So they have no real demands, just "listen to us about crypto, and not anyone else". I'm all for responsible regulation to protect people from scams, but this is ridiculous. Signatories include every single mega tech corporation, which is an obvious development; they want to control this too.

paulgb 4y ago
I mean, that seems like a reasonable demand? We all know that most politicians have a shaky understanding of technology at best, and corporate lobbyists fill that information void with a narrative that advantages their employers. This is a neutral (as in not on crypto payroll) group of technologists saying “hey, we understand this stuff at a technical and/or economic level, we’re willing to talk too”. The signatures from FAANG companies are mostly rank and file engineers. I doubt their companies asked them to sign, but I think it’s representative of how widespread crypto skepticism is in tech.
- prohobo 4y ago
  They're aren't all neutral, many of them are working on private blockchain technologies. For example, anyone working for Meta is on the crypto payroll - just not the Bitcoin/Ethereum/etc ones. My pointed questions are: 1) What are their specific concerns/demands? 2) Who specifically are politicians supposed to be listening to? 3) Why aren't the government appointed CBDC research groups already informing politicians? 4) If they are, then what is this letter about? This is about on the same level as the "Please stop people from talking about the Wuhan lab leak" letter.
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roenxi 4y ago

> We strongly disagree with the narrative — peddled by those with a financial stake in the crypto-asset industry — that these technologies represent a positive financial innovation... This is a little bit unfair. When I became convinced that cryptocurrencies represented a positive financial innovation I immediately went out and bought some. Obviously the more potential someone sees the more they will be involved. This is a legitimate never-before-in-history situation. It was impossible to get an asset with the mix of properties crypto has before around 2010. This is an exciting era.

DonHopkins 4y ago
- zaudo 4y ago
  Boy, that escalated quickly... Can we not critique content in submissions now?
  - DonHopkins 4y ago
    Yes, he certainly escalated to mournful self pity and casting himself as the victim then pivoted to shilling quite quickly, I agree. Of course you can critique: that's exactly what you and I are both doing right now. You don't have to ask me for permission.
- amelius 4y ago
  Also: the enabling of ransomware and other criminal activities.
pavlov 4y ago
> “Obviously the more potential someone sees the more they will be involved” This sentence summarizes why crypto is so peculiar. It’s all about belief in some potential, not utility or returns. And you’re supposed to get “involved”. When you buy a stock or a bond or a derivative or a currency hedge, it doesn’t usually become a way of life. But crypto isn’t a practical financial product so much as a club membership. Bored Apes figured this out and took out the financial pretense completely.

politician 4y ago

Disappointing and misguided. It’s especially sad to see Bruce Schneier indirectly advocate for back doors.

DonHopkins 4y ago
"Indirectly", huh? But not actually? Exactly how is he doing that?
- politician 4y ago
  > "The claims that the blockchain advocates make are not true," said Bruce Schneier. "It's not secure, it's not decentralised. Any system where you forget your password and you lose your life savings is not a safe system," he added. His tweet. He clearly identifies the problem as “lost password” implies disaster. This line of thinking is what the government uses to argue for back doors in cryptography software. The position he is taking leads to the argument that we need our cryptographic keys backed up by the state/corporations so that we don’t lose our life savings.
  - FabHK 4y ago
    You are conflating money and messages. It is perfectly compatible to argue, simultaneously, against cryptocurrencies, and for e2e encrypted messages.
    - politician 4y ago
      The Supreme Court of the US has determined money to be speech, so this is an unwise position to take. If you ask the government to prevent the use of cryptography in cryptocurrencies then you undermine the argument that the government should not tap or intermediate all communications. At the end of the day, a financial transaction IS a message. It’s a command to a ledger to make an adjustment.
      - FabHK 4y ago

rvz 4y ago

I can only predict that both the people signing this letter and the crypto maximalists are going to be very disappointed that this will somehow be the end of all cryptocurrencies or the full adoption and dismantling of the current system with one cryptocoin being a reserve currency. An example of such is where the critics were screaming over the so-called NY bill on 'banning' of PoW [0], but it turns out that not only it doesn't affected PoS cryptocurrencies, but only affected PoW with carbon methods and not via renewable methods. As for the same letter [1] being pushed by critics like Grady Booch, ghuntley, Molly White etc al. who many here know in the industry, we would like to also know the ones who are left blank like 'Darren W. Seng' and 'Stephen Diehl' who are the most extreme and prominent names arguing against crypto. But it turns out that they seem to be connected as C-level executives and co-founders of a private blockchain startup named 'Adjoint' [2] that appears to be in direct competition with public blockchains like Bitcoin, and especially Ethereum. Again it's very strange to see why that wasn't mentioned in the first place and why it's only specifically 'public blockchains' and not all blockchains both 'public' AND 'private'? This critic [3] seems to attack both of them and doesn't see any difference to them at all. Any idea why all of that including something called 'nanocoin' was deleted and scrubbed off of the internet? Maybe cryptocurrencies like Ethereum (which has smart-contract capabilities) are the reason why the folks at Adjoint are eternally at odds with the crypto industry and are dedicated every single day to totally getting rid of all cryptocurrencies? I'm sure many have tried going down this path and Seng, and Diehl seem to have already deleted their repositories and associations [3] with the whole of Adjoint to pursuing this long utopian conquest and bringing others on board. These crypto-assets for sure will be regulated, but once again the goal of getting rid of all of them is a similar path that has been trodden by the free-software activists, anti-IoT activists, privacy activists, anti-AI activists and anti surveillance-capitalism activists etc before them and it has resulted in co-existence rather than a complete and total removal or outright total ban on what they were against. Cryptocurrencies are no different and will co-exist rather than wither away. In this latest push, at least they learnt their lesson with this failed petition in the UK [4]. [0] https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2021/A7389 https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2021/A7389 [1] https://concerned.tech https://concerned.tech [2] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/adjoint-inc https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/adjoint-inc [3] https://medium.com/@johny.codes/private-blockchains-even-worse-crypto-babble-scams-478e9c783b1b https://medium.com/@johny.codes/private-blockchains-even-wor... [4] https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/601629 https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/601629

b1n 4y ago

Bullish.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

Here's a prediction: Crypto is the next cancer from cigarettes, lead in fuel, climate change etc. The thing linking them is that even after it was widely acknowledged these were a net negative, they continued for a long, long time. Harming a wide group of people uneccesarily and massively profiting a select few. If I'm correct, the key indicator will be right wing governments around the globe being paid off to allow the abuse to continue and their media going on the attack. Communist computer scientists, what do they know? They just want to keep the poor white men from getting rich because of political correctness etc. etc. Anyone seen any signs of that yet? Hope I'm wrong, worried I'm correct.

tatertots1234 4y ago
Proof of Work and Bitcoin may be generally trash, and unless they evolve they will eventually crash and burn, but "crypto" on the whole encompasses a wide range of good and bad applications. Here's a prediction: Over the next decade or two, scalable proof of stake crypto currency networks and blockchain-based systems will probably be used as base settlement layers for a growing portion of digital payments, disrupting VISA and PayPal and enabling new ways of sending and coordinating value online.
- TimPC 4y ago
  This world would suck for the same reason I don’t use debit to pay for things from untrusted merchants. Credit cards provide an incredible security layer in transaction reversibility that allows you to transact with unknown merchants. Internet payments doesn’t work without it. What cryptocurrency is going to solve this problem?
  - tatertots1234 4y ago
    You realize that in many countries, credit cards are not common? People pay for things online with their debit card all the time. Not all consumers need or want transaction reversibility, especially if they trust the contracts they are using, like depositing tokens into a DEX contract address that has not changed for several years - this has an extremely low counterparty risk. A VISA- or PayPal-like reversible payment system is definitely possible to build on ETH as a rollup that takes a 1-5% fee of all transactions in order to cover cost of chargebacks. Many applications already support various forms of transaction reversal in their contracts, look at USDC.

bitcoin_anon 4y ago

Serious question for those of you who want to regulate Bitcoin out of existence: What do you propose to do with those of us who, despite your attestations of its uselessness, have deemed it useful and purchased it with our hard earned money? For example, MSTR has ~$4 billion in Bitcoin on its balance sheet. It purchased it on the free market for reasons that were valid to it. However, you disagree and want to step in and do something about it. What do you propose to do about entities like MSTR?

arrosenberg 4y ago
They bought a highly speculative vehicle knowing that eventual government intervention was a risk. I feel sort of bad for the little guys who get wiped out thinking it actually had value, the big funds who institutionally should know the risks can eat cake.
cycrutchfield 4y ago
Bankruptcy
pmyteh 4y ago
Most bitcoin regulation scenarios would just be an ordinary investment risk, in some senses. If you invest in commercial property and then changes in the tax treatment of real estate mean that the value of your investment falls then that just sucks for you. I can't see that it's any different if, for example, the US Government started demanding annual declarations of crypto wallets on tax returns and started taxing capital swings as income. If cryptocurrency is actually confiscated I'm sure that the US government at least will be obliged to pay out. Given the volatility of bitcoin (and the extent to which it will likely drop if governments come out full square against it) I'm sure there will be legal arguments about what the compensation for the taking should be. But if the use-case is largely either (1) speculation or (2) hiding things from governments and governments limit the upside of (1) with tax or structural changes and crack down on (2) I don't think anyone's going to make the bag-holders whole in case of regulation rather than confiscation. Bigger companies than ~$4bn have gone bankrupt by misreading their market risks before.
- 4y ago

tatertots1234 4y ago

The letter has some good and bad. Good because it advocates for more regulation and consumer protection, and points out some obvious concerns with crypto like energy expenditure in proof of work. Bad because the letter misrepresents the technology and paints privacy as a purely criminal behavior, and suggests the entire technology sector is useless. > Similarly, most public blockchain-based financial products are a disaster for financial privacy; the exceptions are a handful of emerging privacy-focused blockchain finance alternatives, and these are a gift to money-launderers. Imagine this argument being applied to End-to-End Encryption. "Most chat messaging apps are a disaster for user privacy; except the ones that are privacy-focused and use E2EE, and those are a gift to terrorists and criminals." There's lots of privacy preserving crypto tech: Monero, ZCash, TornadoCash, and soon Aztec. zk-SNARK and zk-STARK are recent advances here that dramatically change the future landscape. You can also use CEX as a mixer to provide soft anonymity, allowing regulators and IRS to track your finances, without revealing your accounts to the whole world. > Blockchain technology cannot, and will not, have transaction reversal mechanisms because they are antithetical to its base design. This is false. There is a lot of blockchain technology that has transaction reversal mechanisms. USDC and other centralized stablecoins can freeze and mint tokens. Optimistic rollups are built around the very design of transaction reversal. Many NFT projects give the contract owner ability to mint, burn, change metadata, and so on. The original DAO itself was drained and funds reverted by a hard fork, and yet ETH and ETC still continue to exist just fine. > By its very design, blockchain technology, specifically so-called "public blockchains", are poorly suited for just about every purpose currently touted as a present or potential source of public benefit. Bah! Perhaps some of the authors would like to shill their own private blockchain companies (Adjoint Inc).

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> imagine this argument being applied to End-to-End Encryption There's a stark line between encrypted communication and encrypted money. If someone can't see the difference between those bits they shouldn't be handling other peoples' money.
- f38zf5vdt 4y ago

ccuqui 4y ago

Sorry to say, but the petition won´t make any difference. The reason is simple: the problem is not technical, but political. Governments, worldwide, have clear goals: to become more powerful, omniscient and perpetual in power, and the basis for this is the money they hold. Crypto currencies attack precisely the money part and consequently affect the other objectives. The currency digitization movement is global (e-dollar being proposed by the FED, e-Real in Brazil, the digitization of money in India, as well as the banning of cryptocurrencies mining in several countries, claiming: * put your ecological/anti-terrorist argument here *. The truth is that governments do not tolerate the loss of control and the possibility of currency evasion that cryptocurrencies potentially allow. They also don't tolerate the possibility that when they do shit, they can't print money at will to try to cover it up. Neither do they tolerate not having control over all circulating money, especially with regard to taxation. Laws like this will continue to be passed easily, worldwide, as it maintains the status quo that governments will do everything to maintain. PS: I am PRAYING to be wrong on ALL of the above statements....

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> Neither do they tolerate not having control over all circulating money, especially with regard to taxation Plenty of countries have given up their currencies. Presently and throughout history [1][2]. In particular, your toy model of governance isn't terribly predictive of American politics. > not having control over all circulating money, especially with regard to taxation Non sequitur. I can invoice from New York in euros or Bitcoin and still pay my taxes on those earnings in dollars. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_board#Examples_in_recent_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_board#Examples_in_rec... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_union#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_union#History
paulgb 4y ago
> Governments, worldwide, have clear goals: to become more powerful, omniscient and perpetual in power I think it's a mistake to treat governments (especially the elected government(s) like this letter targets) as a singular, rational entity. Instead they are a collection of individual (let's generously assume) rational actors whose career goals are often at odds with each other. These career goals depend on the support of the electorate, which is why petitions can work.

generationP 4y ago

> Finally, blockchain technologies facilitate few, if any, real-economy uses. On the other hand, the underlying crypto-assets have been the vehicle for unsound and highly volatile speculative investment schemes that are being actively promoted to retail investors who may be unable to understand their nature and risk. Other significant externalities include threats to national security through money laundering and ransomware attacks, financial stability risks from high price volatility, speculation and susceptibility to run risk, massive climate emissions from the proof-of-work technology utilized by some of the most widely traded crypto-assets, and investor risk from large scale scams and other criminal financial activity. Venezuelan emigrants have been using cryptocurrencies to get cash back to their families: https://www.reuters.com/technology/venezuelas-economy-regresses-crypto-fills-gaps-2021-06-22/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/venezuelas-economy-regres... Navalny's Foundation takes BTC and ETH donations and recommends them as the safest option: https://donate.fbk.world/?utm_campaign=10MAR22_fundraising_acf_link&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter https://donate.fbk.world/?utm_campaign=10MAR22_fundraising_a... Several Ukrainian humanitarian and military fundraisers are using crypto: https://nitter.net/kamilkazani/status/1533471887958986758#m https://nitter.net/kamilkazani/status/1533471887958986758#m These are just the first three examples that come to my mind. When I see Americans crow about the uselessness of cryptocurrencies, I think of Marie Antoinette.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
More Venezuelans used Zelle with dollars than crypto. I was able to donate dollars without issue directly to the Ukrainian government. Crypto proponents trot out these edge suboptimal use cases as excuses to allow an entire global Ponzi scheme to continue, when the discussion should be “what mechanisms can be provided to support refugee value protection and transferring value to friendly nations under attack using existing fiat rails and the laws that protect users of them?” That’s not hard to do using existing systems, but crypto proponents are so wrapped up in the thought of their digital assets rapidly declining in value that it isn’t an option to them. “Crypto must be the way.” when the evidence is clear it is not. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/06/16/venezuela-is-a-testing-ground-for-digital-dollarization-and-zelle-doesnt-like-it/ https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/06/16/venezuela-is-a-t...

alaricus 4y ago

This is one of the most ridiculous things I read in a very long time. Why does it concern those 1500 people how I decide to store my money? What's next, regulating where I can spend my money and where I can't? There is nothing responsible about the government interfering in things it should not be interfering with.

malermeister 4y ago
> What's next, regulating where I can spend my money and where I can't? This is already a thing. See drugs, slaves etc.

baby 4y ago

Disappointing. I think technologists who also understand finance should be heard, not technologists who don’t. Where are the cryptographers on this list besides Schneier?

zja 4y ago
What makes you think the signatories don’t understand finance?
- baby 4y ago
  I guess it looks like a list of random signatures to me.

bo1024 4y ago

What I find most disappointing about this is the extremely vague ask. “Do something, anything” coming from technologists? And trusting that politicians will not twist that as supporting their own agendas?

kevinpet 4y ago

Why is a letter about crypto referring to Fintech in general in the title? To me this shows a distinct lack of context and the view that these people think they know a lot about crypto, but know very little about finance and moreover the authors don't think they need to know much about finance. For example, the bald assertion that crypto has no real world use cases ignores the work happening within traditional finance to use blockchain for trade settlement. Do I know everything about these topic? No, but I'm not writing a public letter soliciting signatures. Am I a crypto shill? No, I think current crypto is a rip off, but this letter isn't a good argument for that. It's too light on details and doesn't acknowledge the areas where it could be valuable.