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"Banning mining" has literally nothing to do with whether or not legal taxes are paid.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> has literally nothing to do with whether or not legal taxes are paid Someone claiming “technical impossibility” in banning mining implies the government can’t catch them mining illegally. Most criminals don’t pay tax on their gains.
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  > Someone claiming “technical impossibility” in banning mining implies the government can’t catch them mining illegally. I think my statement is pretty correct. Short of something like cutting off power or global communication, you can't really technically prevent Bitcoin mining by decree. Of course, anything that exists in physical space can be jailed/shot/seized/destroyed, so your statement is also correct. Goody. > Most criminals don’t pay tax on their gains. It goes without saying, but somebody who doesn't pay tax on their gains is considered a criminal by our system. PS: I don't want to get into a mind-reading session with you, but your beef seems to be with rich people who you consider to not pay enough taxes. That is a wholly separate issue from whether or not Bitcoin mining is "allowed" or not.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > cutting off power or global communication, you can't really technically prevent Bitcoin mining by decree Same way we can’t prevent terrorist financing or bribery. But we can fight it. (Drawing a functional, not moral analogy.) Consider how the public might receive a terrorism financier or bribe broker arguing that these can’t be perfectly enforced and so should be made legal. That’s Bitcoin’s image problem. > anything that exists in physical space can be jailed/shot/seized/destroyed This is my point.
    - logicalmonster 4y ago
      1) Your argument takes a dishonest form because your solution has nothing to do with the problems you're citing. If you were arguing for better tax evasion detection for crypto users who didn't pay their legally obliged taxes or doing better to find and stop terrorist financiers who operated via crypto, that would be one thing that would be worth having a reasonable discussion about. But a proposal to "ban bitcoin mining" is something wholly different from those points. 2) You're under no obligation to do so, but I hope you consider my moral question up above. The human misery and suffering that comes from a crashed currency is a repeatable and verifiable phenomenon through history and far worse than anything that could conceivably come from climate change or tax evasion. Why is it so scary to have some potential alternatives available?
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > tax evasion detection My point was never tax evasion. It’s that saying Bitcoin can’t be banned implies acceptance of breaking the law via money laundering and tax evasion. What I said would be true if every crypto holder today paid taxes or none. > Why is it so scary to have some potential alternatives available? The alternative is causing clear and present harm. This only contemplates a PoW ban. That seems reasonably constrained. (Crypto protects against currency crashes as well as the British pound. When Argentina hyper inflates, its population is no less unemployed for having the dollar.)
        logicalmonster 4y ago
        1) Short of blocking communications and/or electricity, there is no technical switch you can flip to ban something that can be decentralized like Bitcoin mining. That's why I used the word technical above. We're in agreement that you can actually try to ban Bitcoin mining by jailing/shooting/seizing/destroying various people and things, I just don't want to do that. 2) We're probably going to disagree sharply here, but I don't believe that climate change is causing clear and present harm. And if it was, nuclear energy is the solution to it, which many environmentalists desperately reject to the point of destroying their countries. I can't take climate change peoples' ideas seriously when they reject the only workable solution to the problem they claim will cause great harm. 3) PoW is a proven system that has been proven to work, no pun intended. PoS solutions are extremely interesting, but have security and centralization concerns and have not been proven as workable in the same way as PoW. Going from PoW to PoS is not necessarily a magic solution for anything and might ruin something good for humanity. Maybe Ethereum pulls it off and there's no long-term changes or problems, but nothing has been proven yet.

> has literally nothing to do with whether or not legal taxes are paid Someone claiming “technical impossibility” in banning mining implies the government can’t catch them mining illegally. Most criminals don’t pay tax on their gains.

logicalmonster 4y ago
> Someone claiming “technical impossibility” in banning mining implies the government can’t catch them mining illegally. I think my statement is pretty correct. Short of something like cutting off power or global communication, you can't really technically prevent Bitcoin mining by decree. Of course, anything that exists in physical space can be jailed/shot/seized/destroyed, so your statement is also correct. Goody. > Most criminals don’t pay tax on their gains. It goes without saying, but somebody who doesn't pay tax on their gains is considered a criminal by our system. PS: I don't want to get into a mind-reading session with you, but your beef seems to be with rich people who you consider to not pay enough taxes. That is a wholly separate issue from whether or not Bitcoin mining is "allowed" or not.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > cutting off power or global communication, you can't really technically prevent Bitcoin mining by decree Same way we can’t prevent terrorist financing or bribery. But we can fight it. (Drawing a functional, not moral analogy.) Consider how the public might receive a terrorism financier or bribe broker arguing that these can’t be perfectly enforced and so should be made legal. That’s Bitcoin’s image problem. > anything that exists in physical space can be jailed/shot/seized/destroyed This is my point.
  - logicalmonster 4y ago
    1) Your argument takes a dishonest form because your solution has nothing to do with the problems you're citing. If you were arguing for better tax evasion detection for crypto users who didn't pay their legally obliged taxes or doing better to find and stop terrorist financiers who operated via crypto, that would be one thing that would be worth having a reasonable discussion about. But a proposal to "ban bitcoin mining" is something wholly different from those points. 2) You're under no obligation to do so, but I hope you consider my moral question up above. The human misery and suffering that comes from a crashed currency is a repeatable and verifiable phenomenon through history and far worse than anything that could conceivably come from climate change or tax evasion. Why is it so scary to have some potential alternatives available?
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > tax evasion detection My point was never tax evasion. It’s that saying Bitcoin can’t be banned implies acceptance of breaking the law via money laundering and tax evasion. What I said would be true if every crypto holder today paid taxes or none. > Why is it so scary to have some potential alternatives available? The alternative is causing clear and present harm. This only contemplates a PoW ban. That seems reasonably constrained. (Crypto protects against currency crashes as well as the British pound. When Argentina hyper inflates, its population is no less unemployed for having the dollar.)
      - logicalmonster 4y ago
        1) Short of blocking communications and/or electricity, there is no technical switch you can flip to ban something that can be decentralized like Bitcoin mining. That's why I used the word technical above. We're in agreement that you can actually try to ban Bitcoin mining by jailing/shooting/seizing/destroying various people and things, I just don't want to do that. 2) We're probably going to disagree sharply here, but I don't believe that climate change is causing clear and present harm. And if it was, nuclear energy is the solution to it, which many environmentalists desperately reject to the point of destroying their countries. I can't take climate change peoples' ideas seriously when they reject the only workable solution to the problem they claim will cause great harm. 3) PoW is a proven system that has been proven to work, no pun intended. PoS solutions are extremely interesting, but have security and centralization concerns and have not been proven as workable in the same way as PoW. Going from PoW to PoS is not necessarily a magic solution for anything and might ruin something good for humanity. Maybe Ethereum pulls it off and there's no long-term changes or problems, but nothing has been proven yet.