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It will not happen. The Bitcoin lobby is already to strong in the US. Crypto firms are among the top Democrat donors. Crypto CEO SBF plans on donating $100mil

• PontifexMinimus 4y ago
  > political donation the highest form of return of investment that exists Which is why it should be banned.
  • nordsieck 4y ago
    > Which is why it should be banned. Functionally, this isn't possible. If the open method is banned, people will start using layers of indirection. It's fundamentally a problem with democracy.
    • TomSwirly 4y ago
      "There's no point in passing laws, because people will get around them." Why does anyone believe this?
      • nordsieck 4y ago
        > "There's no point in passing laws, because people will get around them." > Why does anyone believe this? Good laws are great. And there are plenty of them. But passing bad laws just because "we need to do something" is worse than doing nothing.
      • blooalien 4y ago
        Mostly despair from seeing it happen far more often than it really should due to rampant corrupting "in high places" I'd imagine…
      • oceanplexian 4y ago
        Because ultimately a “law” is nothing other than words on paper that only exist in reality because the government is willing to use force to make it so. Some people seem to think that people are like computers and “law” is the programming. No, people will continue to mine Bitcoin, or do drugs, or whatever other illegal thing up until the point where the FBI breaks down a door and some people get shot or (best case) thrown behind bars. My opinion is that laws are nothing other than a form of violence. If you support violence against people for running a computer program I don’t know what to say.
        • pixl97 4y ago
          Law is like computer code, adding more of it to your application doesn't necessarily make it better.
        • derac 4y ago
          What if the computer program hurts people / violates their rights?
      • gojomo 4y ago
        When you pass laws that can't practically be enforced, or that everyone figures the insiders/incumbents have already tilted in their favor with de jure or de facto immunities – such that they're only ever used unevenly against disfavored upstarts/outsiders – it erodes confidence in laws & law-enforcement more generally. Under a majoritarian system, even if >50% claim to want a law in polls or ballots, but far-more-than-50% of the same people (or even just: the relevant targets of the law) can flout it without consequences, that's typically a bad law.
    • hagy 4y ago
      Yep, if direct political donations are banned or highly limited, then SBF (and Thiel) will just fund a bunch of media startups that promote their preferred policies and candidates. These firms can appear to be profit seeking ventures while staffed with ideologues who are incentivized to optimize reach and influence.
      • TomSwirly 4y ago
        You: "Nothing we can ever do will ever change anything. Best to give up before we start."
        • hagy 4y ago
          There's plenty we can do to improve things and therefore fighting a losing war against money in politics is a distraction that simply wastes our limited time and effort.
    • cesarb 4y ago
      As they say, "perfect is the enemy of good". Adding layers of indirection makes it less efficient, which lessens its impact.
      • nordsieck 4y ago
        > Adding layers of indirection makes it less efficient, which lessens its impact. Maybe. It'll make it less effective. But it'll also make it more difficult to detect.
    • intelVISA 4y ago
      > If the open method is banned, people will start using layers of indirection. Noo it's spreading!!
    • PoignardAzur 4y ago
      Speaking as someone living in France, where campaign budget limitations are a pretty big deal (to the point a former president is facing jail time for breaking them), I don't see how this is impossible. Yes, powerful people flout them (Sarkozy) or find ways to pass off contributions as gifts (Fillon's suits) or use the support of media oligarchs without a direct monetary contribution (Macron, Zemmour) but overall, the end result is that there's a lot less money in politics, and politicians aren't completely dependent on the funding of industry lobbies for their election. Same thing with political advertising. I'm seeing scandal after scandal about Facebook censoring or not censoring this or that political ad, and I'm just thinking "I'm so glad this is the kind of bullshit we don't need to deal with".
      • gojomo 4y ago
        How do you know there's less money in politics if it's gone dark in harder-to-measure ways?
        • PoignardAzur 4y ago
          Well I don't know for sure. It's not like private interests have disappeared, and I'm not privy to how they manifest. But if nothing else, we can assume that there's less money in politics because campaigns are less expensive. Macron's last campaign cost 16 millions euros. Biden's last campaign cost 1.06 billion dollars. That money has to come from somewhere. In theory, Macron's campaign could have hidden costs not reported in accounting (which is what Sarkozy did) but in practice it's hard to hide that (hence Sarkozy getting caught). Big campaign meetings in expensive stadiums are, by design, hard to hide. Also, since you can't spend money getting your candidate on TV ads, there's not a huge incentive to blow up your campaign budget. Regulators also ensure that TV outlets spend an equal amount of time on each candidate. (Though there are also ways to game that, eg CNews got fined for putting Zemmour on prime time and every other candidate in night slots). So while power games still exist (the key to becoming French president is basically being friends with Xavier Niel), we can assume there's less money overall because parties have fewer things to spend money on.
          • 4y ago
    • PontifexMinimus 4y ago
      You might equally argue that murder should be legal, as banning it won't stop it happening. Making something illegal rarely prevents it completely, but very often reduces it.
      • cwalv 4y ago
        It very often reduces it, and also often has unintended consequences (e.g. prohibition era in the US). In the context of the parent's point, that when "the open method is banned, people will start using layers of indirection", it's not hard to think of some unintended consequences that could end up worse than the original problem.
  • ergocoder 4y ago
    Elon Musk can solve this. He could just tweet how easy it is to lobby for electric vehicles and how he will spend a fraction of his money maybe a couple billions on lobbying. Maybe name a specific senate he may or may not donate to. He could specify donald trump or a certain republican senate for maximum impact. There's no need to spend anything. There will be a push to ban political donation immediately.
  • trappist 4y ago
    Of all the possible reasons, the ROI is why it should be banned?
• Alex3917 4y ago
  > The Bitcoin lobby is already to strong in the US. Banning PoW would benefit Bitcoin; it's the main thing preventing it from becoming more popular right now. Having the government force the Bitcoin community to do what they've been unable to do themselves would be the best of all worlds for them.
  • danuker 4y ago
    Even better would be to tax all industries fairly, according to their greenhouse gas emissions. Or even energy production directly. The US is the second largest polluter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhouse_gas_emissions_per_person#/media/File:20210626_Variwide_chart_of_greenhouse_gas_emissions_per_capita_by_country.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhous...
    • kitten_mittens_ 4y ago
      The third per capita by your link.
      • mkl 4y ago
        Only in the graph, which shows a subset of countries. In the main list it's 11th by the 2018 column.
      • danuker 4y ago
        If you look at area (pollution per capita x population), it's the second.
    • lettergram 4y ago
      > Even better would be to tax all industries fairly, according to their greenhouse gas emissions. I mean, that would mean exponentially more expensive food… https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/03/1086822 https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/03/1086822 My take is we need to allow unlimited emissions of carbon dioxide and nitrogen (reduction in other stuff though actually toxic). It increases food growth (plants love carbon) and arable land and decreases poverty. Plus cheaper energy means improved quality of life and technological advancement. We have centuries of known fuel sources and can move to nuclear any time we wish. A carbon tax effectively increases human suffering for the hope of reduced temperatures. In reality, the cost is passed to consumers and there’s no indication it will reduce global temperatures.
• api 4y ago
  Interesting that I hear a lot about crypto money going to the far right. That may be a thing too but I guess the crypto world is not politically monolithic. That and if you really want influence you spread it around.
  • 323 4y ago
    Yes, the Bitcoin Maximalists which are based, red-pilled, on carnivore diet, gun totting, rolling coal, ... One of them (Tone Vays) even participated in the Stop the Steal marches and Jan 6 riots.
    • api 4y ago
      Are different coins or use cases more aligned with different political ideologies? I guess that is getting close to what Balaji Srivanisan calls the network state. Different virtual states with different ideologies. Wow. Put all the cyberpunk stuff immediately into nonfiction.
    • rvz 4y ago
      I know right, Jack Dorsey is somehow far right for being a Bitcoin Maximalist. /s
• nonameiguess 4y ago
  > calls political donation the highest form of return of investment that exists Well, he seems to be shitposting or knowingly lying, then. It says he has a $30 billion fortune currently, yet still drives a Corolla and uses his parent's Netflix account, so he apparently wasn't super rich to begin with. So unless he thinks he's going to become the world's first multi-trillionaire, there is no $100 mil to $1 bil investment that can return what he got out of starting his current business, which wasn't a political donation. Or he means something non-financial by "highest form," as in he might actually care about the Democratic agenda apart from whether it can make him even richer or not.
  • 323 4y ago
    > there is no $100 mil to $1 bil investment that can return what he got out of starting his current business, which wasn't a political donation. Numerous startups turned $1 mil into $1 bil. But nobody yet turned $1 bil into $1 trillion. Scale matters. When you deal in billions, your expected returns are much lower.
    • Der_Einzige 4y ago
      Apple???
• fsociety999 4y ago
  What makes you so sure the existing lobby are not the ones pushing for this? Also what makes you so sure that the banking/Wall Street lobby is not larger than the crypto lobby in terms of $$$? I suspect it is much larger. I also suspect they are the ones more ideologically aligned with DC here. Proof of stake and other “environmentally friendly” consensus algorithms allow a select few to control the network and benefit the most from it which I suspect is the real goal here. The “environmental impact” is just an excuse. It’s true that a large percentage of Bitcoin is owned by a few people, but at least now the benefit to them is only financial gain. Once you start to allow rich people to validate the blockchain itself, then they can begin to censor and block transactions or wallets from any individuals they deem unworthy or a threat to the powers at be. We’ve already seen this happen with pretty much every traditional payment provider over the last few years to some extent so it was only a matter of time before they decided to come for Bitcoin. Their real goal is to cripple and control the Bitcoin network. If they really cared about the environment they would go after energy companies or defense contractors or the banking industry who all use orders of magnitude more energy than Bitcoin miners. As a sidenote, the executive branch has become much too powerful. They were never supposed to legislate like this. Every president since George W Bush has used extreme executive power, and no one seems to care. We are supposed to have elected representatives to legislate, not a king.
  • tremarley 4y ago
    Very well said!
  • JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > what makes you so sure that the banking/Wall Street lobby is not larger than the crypto lobby These are the same. Well, at least Wall Street. Main Street banks may be positioned against (I have seen no evidence of this), but that’s just community banks at this point. The big boys are universal. What you’re seeing is the environmental and anti-finance lobbies allying. The fact that crypto users see Wall Street as the enemy constrains its leaders, who can’t openly ally with traditional finance on policy without looking compromised.
    • 4y ago
• JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > was also one of just a handful of donors who spent $10 million-plus backing President Joe Biden in 2020 This is peanuts for a hated industry. Facebook squirrels away far more to no benefit.
• MeltingAaah 4y ago
  Perhaps we all should finally standup together than and advocate much louder for Bitcoin crypto ban After all we all are loosing the climate change game thanks to Bitcoin and co. We all pay the price. High electric bills due to more AC usage, more demand on electricity through Bitcoin mining and higher GPU prices.
  • blooalien 4y ago
    > "After all we all are loosing the climate change game thanks to Bitcoin and co." Thanks in part to Bitcoin and co. There's a mess of other really major contributors as well, and most all of 'em are filthy rich and/or giant corporate entities.
  • ipaddr 4y ago
    Let's ban air travel. It would make a big difference. Can't lose the climate game
    • throwaway5959 4y ago
      Air travel provides actual value whereas Bitcoin provides what exactly aside from speculation?
      • rysertio 4y ago
        Bitcoin provides an easy way to send money across borders. It's a hellhole if you want to get money across by using traditional banking system, because there's a lot of debt involved and the fees just skyrocket.
        • jfghi 4y ago
          Can you flush out the details on this? I’ve wired money internationally and it was fairly simple. I understand that not all locations are able to receive wire transfers. What are the associated fees and process times with sending 100 dollars with bitcoin including the purchasing and selling in order to complete the transaction of currency? What countries does this end up being useful for?
• lamontcg 4y ago
  Yeah they won't move to ban it until it collapses on its own and the lobbying money dries up.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• gojomo 4y ago
  Why would SBF particularly care about proof-of-work, when he can make plenty, maybe more, from proof-of-stake? He's donated to climate-change charities & declared FTX to be carbon-neutral. He might even see an angle for profit in helping suppress proof-of-work!
  • 015a 4y ago
    Yeah; I think its a mistake to view the crypto ecosystem as one entity, even though its easy to think of it like that outside-in. We don't treat tech that way; Apple is at war with Facebook, and they're lobbying for fairly different things. My understanding of crypto culture is hazy, like most, but from what I've picked up: to some degree, there's Bitcoin, and there's everything else (well, there's that mistake of lumping everyone together again, but at least its more specific). Bitcoin has a weird traditionalist culture surrounding it; I once heard it described as "Bitcoiners would rather spend millions harvesting energy from a volcano than just reduce their energy needs." There's less culture of open collaboration and integration; less interest in useful utility; Bitcoin maximalists still cling on to the Digital Gold metaphor, whereas ETH maximalists have more utilitarian aspirations toward the currency/network acting like the Visa or Mastercard of a global computer, stacks of applications built-on-top-of one another, and ETH rises with the tide. I sometimes wonder if the difference in culture has anything to do with Bitcoin's lack of a BDFL. ETH has Vitalik; very public guy, well spoken, has that fantastically nerdy & idealistic aesthetic reminiscent of early Page, Brin, Gates, and Zuck. Bitcoin has no one; and maybe that's allowed its community's more baser human instincts to manifest. Distrust, fear, greed, etc. Whereas BTC maximalists will argue that there's no perfect decentralized trust POS system, and thus POW is fundamentally necessary, Vitalik has publicly said that POS isn't perfect, but good enough.
• simonebrunozzi 4y ago
  You are way too sure about your stuff. "it will not happen", I'm laughing. See at what happened in China. You have a few crypto billionaires, and yet mining has been banned. I suggest you learn some humility from history.
  • abdabab 4y ago
    Is lobbying the same in China as it is in USA?