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It doesn't reduce police powers, but in the long term if it pans out it'll reduce the power of fiat currency. That's what people talk about when they say it red
by avar 13y ago
It doesn't reduce police powers, but in the long term if it pans out it'll reduce the power of fiat currency. That's what people talk about when they say it reduces the power of the government.
- sliverstorm 13y agoSure, but law enforcement isn't concerned with monetary policy and deficit spending.
- avar 13y agoThat's why people say it reduces "governmental power", not "law enforcement power". The "government" includes the organization that issues the fiat currency that you use. You could argue that the increase in law enforcement power would offset the decrease in power from not being able to issue fiat currency, but that would mostly be a silly line of argument to pursue.
- crygin 13y agoNot least because governmental power does not derive from the ability to issue fiat currency; it derives from a legal (or socially accepted) monopoly on force. Failure of a sanctioned fiat currency could reduce governmental legitimacy, but law enforcement is the backbone of governmental power.
- avar 13y agoPartly yes, but being able to control the macro economy is arguably a much greater power in a western state than the monopoly on coercive force. Force mostly has to be individually applied, and you can only take it so far before you have massive pushback in the form of civil unrest. Printing money, to pick a simple example, is much more effective and can be done across the economy as a whole. Could you imagine police forces breaking into everyone's home and taking half their cash in a matter of days? It's unthinkable that that would happen for logistical reasons alone. But that's what we've effectively seen some modern western governments do just recently by rapidly deflating their currencies. Abolishing fiat currency would take away that power, and make no mistake it is an immense power. It's the power to shape entire economies at the stroke of a pen.
- sliverstorm 13y agoThe original question was: Why would law enforcement be eager to support a technology which...
- PeterisP 13y agoCan't NSA datacenters with specialized crypto chips simply get 51% of bitcoin mining power for some time, if they want? Now that would be 'fiat currency'.
- bigiain 13y agoI wonder… I've seen a lot these last few weeks about the volume of Chinese Bitcoin transactions. I wonder if the "hobbyist/geek/hacker/early-adopter" Bitcoin miners will end up attempting to "hold the balance of power" while state-backed Chinese and US crypto-clusters fight each other for 51% of the hashrate? So long as "we" can keep a few percent of the global hashrate out of US/Chinese government control, perhaps they'll both escalate at similar-enough rates that a few thousand USB ASICs and a few tens of thousand gaming-rig GPUs might keep everybodies stach of Bitcoin "safe"?
- wmf 13y agoIt seems unlikely that two parties would try to launch 51% attacks at the same time. And if one party started an attack it would probably take someone else at least 30 days to fab enough chips to respond, by which time the attack would be over one way or the other.
- rictic 13y agoThey could spend a lot of money and gain the ability to double spend and stall any (or all) transactions, but they couldn't create more coins than allowed or seize assets.
- sliverstorm 13y agoIf they control the network, can't they determine the mining difficulty? Difficulty is a single, unified knob that combined with the miners directly controls the rate of BTC generation. Also, if they can freeze (stall) certain wallets indefinitely, that's pretty much as good as asset seizure.
- tlrobinson 13y ago51% attacks don't allow you to mine arbitrary amounts of Bitcoin. At worst they could DoS the Bitcoin network and double-spend their funds, but the recipients (their own citizens? other governments?) would find out and be pissed.
- eof 13y agogovernments aren't exactly known for their long term outlook