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It was supposed to be cash without the burden of nation state oversight. Instead, it turned into a giant casino ecosystem of unregulated securities involving mo

It was supposed to be cash without the burden of nation state oversight. Instead, it turned into a giant casino ecosystem of unregulated securities involving more and more layers of abstraction (exchanges, stable-coins, NFTs, bundled transactions, hedges, subchains, ...)

nickelpro 4y ago
> It was supposed to be cash without the burden of nation state oversight While convenience remains the core point under contention, the secondary point of debate with crypto is the one you raise here: why is this a good thing? Why would I want an unregulated currency, free of consumer protections or government oversight? If someone steals my credit card I call the bank and reverse the charges. When a bank gets robbed or collapses, the FDIC ensures consumers are unaffected. Governments aren't a power independent of their communities, they're not aliens from outer space interfering with natural human ways of life. Government is how we the community organize ourselves to ensure our collective protection. They're, obviously, deeply imperfect, but a system completely severing itself from those organizing principles is fated to replicate them with even greater imperfection.
- somewhereoutth 4y ago
  Your last paragraph is spot on. The right know that government intervention is what holds them back from consolidating power over the less fortunate in society, so it has been a central plank of their strategy to present the government as indeed being 'aliens from outer space', and so to neuter its reach.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- moistly 4y ago
  > Why would I want an unregulated currency, free of consumer protections or government oversight And why would I believe that it has value compared to gold, or a cow? And while the value of a dollar is an abstract of those physical trades, at least it has the backing of the nation’s resources, its people, and its military ability to plunder. Bitcoin has all the backing of …
wpietri 4y ago
If you read about the history of nation-state oversight of finance, you can learn that going "without the burden of nation state oversight" is approximately equivalent to "a giant casino ecosystem". Not always, of course, but often enough. E.g., the South Seas bubble, the wildcat banking era, and the US stock market leading up to Black Tuesday. An awful lot of financial regulation comes into being because financiers working in some unregulated area create such a giant disaster that there's enough popular anger to override government's normal tendency to suck up to people with money.

nickelpro 4y ago

> It was supposed to be cash without the burden of nation state oversight While convenience remains the core point under contention, the secondary point of debate with crypto is the one you raise here: why is this a good thing? Why would I want an unregulated currency, free of consumer protections or government oversight? If someone steals my credit card I call the bank and reverse the charges. When a bank gets robbed or collapses, the FDIC ensures consumers are unaffected. Governments aren't a power independent of their communities, they're not aliens from outer space interfering with natural human ways of life. Government is how we the community organize ourselves to ensure our collective protection. They're, obviously, deeply imperfect, but a system completely severing itself from those organizing principles is fated to replicate them with even greater imperfection.

somewhereoutth 4y ago
Your last paragraph is spot on. The right know that government intervention is what holds them back from consolidating power over the less fortunate in society, so it has been a central plank of their strategy to present the government as indeed being 'aliens from outer space', and so to neuter its reach.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
moistly 4y ago
> Why would I want an unregulated currency, free of consumer protections or government oversight And why would I believe that it has value compared to gold, or a cow? And while the value of a dollar is an abstract of those physical trades, at least it has the backing of the nation’s resources, its people, and its military ability to plunder. Bitcoin has all the backing of …

wpietri 4y ago

If you read about the history of nation-state oversight of finance, you can learn that going "without the burden of nation state oversight" is approximately equivalent to "a giant casino ecosystem". Not always, of course, but often enough. E.g., the South Seas bubble, the wildcat banking era, and the US stock market leading up to Black Tuesday. An awful lot of financial regulation comes into being because financiers working in some unregulated area create such a giant disaster that there's enough popular anger to override government's normal tendency to suck up to people with money.