> You can create all sorts of regulations but that will only harden the stance of crypto maxis because it will only prove them right.

They can harden their stance all they want, but breaking the crypto ecosystem is incredibly easy if governments really wanted to. All you have to do is ban companies from interacting with crypto currencies in any form, be it accepting, exchanging, holding, or producing them. That would immediately shut off the gateways between the crypto ecosystem and the real economy, which reduces crypto to P2P transactions in parking lots.

History has shown that when the potential rewards are large enough, the players will literally move jurisdictions to tap into the rewards. All that happens is forgone tax revenues for nations.

Because unless you have a one world government (hopefully, no one is a proponent of this), there will be at least some countries that will welcome you. And since the rewards will be large enough, market participants will even do illegal things to access it.

All it will eventually do is make your country less competitive until you have no recourse but to change the law. FOMO isn't just for people; it's for nations as well.

International sanctions are a thing, _especially_ in the world of banking.

The rewards are minuscule. It's a niche industry with no potential of it ever not being niche unless is has mass adoption.

All they'd really have to do is announce that they were going to build enough computing power to initiate a 51 percent attack on bitcoin. I imagine the NSA is already there but it would be a nice cash injection for Intel or whatever.

Bitcoin has a very, very short history of being a decent store of value and the US Government publicly saying they plan to break it would collapse the entire scheme.

It’d have to be a very prolonged 51% attack. Other nation states would likely join in, and it’s not like the USG can stop millions of people around the world from mining. Even if they succeeded in driving the price of most coins to zero, it’d be a Pyrrhic victory with USG looking like giant, insecure assholes spending a huge amount of resources just to destroy something that democratized money and banking. Months later, a new white paper would come out that finds a way to disadvantage state actors and viola, the game of whack-a-mole begins anew. People want out of dollars because the US economy is mismanaged, and that demand isn’t going away.

Bitcoin can die tomorrow and crypto would still remain a $1T industry

This is a silly proposal, bitcoin could just switch to a new PoW algo within days if not hours if someone did that.

I mean, companies are barely interacting with crypto right now, very few businesses use it for trade, but it keeps going up so i dont see how that works. US based onramps are useful only to americans, and i m sure people will seek ways to convert their dollars elsewhere, like they did for years before coinbase or other us based exchanges existed

> companies are barely interacting with crypto right now

Not sure that is true

> According to security firm Sophos, 51% of organizations it sampled globally found themselves the targets of ransomware attacks in 2019. The crooks succeeded in encrypting data in 73% of these attacks. Just over a quarter of these organizations paid the ransom, or their insurance companies forked over the cash.

https://m-cacm.acm.org/magazines/2021/4/251337-the-worsening...

Why is this post so downvoted? It seems that antigovernment sentiment is not popular here

It’s not only that but also all that “crypto is not technologically interesting and it’s just Ponzi scheme!”.

There are so many interesting and unique things there. You can mix cryptography, finance, etc. into endless amount of protocols.

Here is some interesting ideas in crypto: decentralized stable coin (dai), automatic market makers (uniswap), zero knowledge rollups, dns that you actually own and not rent, p2p prediction markets, automatic borrowing, algorithmic stable coins without peg and so on and so forth.

And there is always something new.

I think blockchain is essential building block of the future free web.(at least stuff like dns)

> Why is this post so downvoted?

Oddly, HN is over all rather closed minded about cryptocurrencies/blockchain. I can understand being jaded at all the bitcoin maximalist out there that are frankly ignorant or even just being generally weary about the idea of such currencies... but it seems like the general sentiment is very negative in almost every thread with very minimal understanding of cryptocurrencies or frankly currencies in general.

Shame, tbh. I wish there was better discussion on the topic. Blockchain is very cool, even if you don't believe bitcoin is replacing your dollars ever.

At this point, I don't even care about Bitcoin anymore. It serves no purpose. I don't even care about cryptocurrencies as such.

But the ideas popping out from these fields are just so darn exciting. DeFi makes all these complex financial instruments that were previously the sole purview of big banks accessible to anyone.

And we're barely scratching the surface with NFTs and DAOs.

I think it's exciting too, but I'm also a little weary of making these complex financial instruments more prevalent. I see more of a downside to the increase in these instruments overall. Still fascinating to watch unfold though.

I see the downside as well, but all the same, I'd be happy if I can own the rewards and the risk. If I go broke because of experimenting with this stuff, I'll be okay with it - it's my money, my mistakes.

Lots of people went broke in 2008 because of their bankers' mistakes.

It strikes at the heart of ownership and responsibility and I can't understand why HN isn't bullish about it. Everyone here loves the idea of owning their data and their hardware and their software but somehow, their money should be owned by...bankers? So they can invest it in junk and crash the market?

Doesn't make sense to me.

> dns that you actually own and not rent

Which projects are working on this? That sounds awesome

What you described as the ideals of crypto maximalists largely applies to fiat currency. Individuals "own" their own USD, are able to share and use as they please within the bounds of legality.

Not sure what it means to "censor" currency, but if they consider governments' economic stewardship to be foolhardy, why would they consider the wisdom of miners, programmers or the crypto's regulating body to be superior?

What's left is the question of legality, anonymity lets users skirt the government's laws, which has value to basically criminals.

> anonymity lets users skirt the government's laws, which has value to basically criminals

And dissidents and marginalized communities and activists and anyone living in an oppressive state.

Are you really trying to argue that anonymity is only valuable to criminals?

What value does crypto provide to those groups you mentioned, that cash cannot provide? If the answer is, it allows them to break laws then yes by definition they are criminals. You can argue that some of these laws are unjust, sure but that's tangential to the question. The value of crypto by volume is largely for speculative bets and criminal activities.

Governments that are democratically elected aren't scared of anything but losing their job if they don't get re-elected. When a government starts to defend it's own existence against people's will, it becomes fascism. And by the way, this ideology you are talking about is called liberalism. The idea that money could and should be provided by open market rather than a central government is not some crazy idea. It's just wasn't possible before bitcoin.