> We believe you had drugs on you, even though we couldn't find them. We also see you play World of Warcraft and that you're used the in game auction house to sell your items for in game money to other players. If you don't please guilty to the drug charge, we're going to hit you with 1,000+ counts of of violations of the IBCSP (or whatever this law is called); you'd be looking at 1,000 years in prison and a 1,000,0000$ fine, minimum.
The US government _does_ things like that. And, as such (because they have shown they cannot be trusted to act in the spirit of the law), we need to limit what powers we give them. I find it astonishing that anyone doesn't realize this.
Upstarts are able to enter quickly based on technical merit alone RIGHT NOW. How does adding regulation simplify that for them? It doesn't - it makes it far more restrictive. You must be on crack to believe these provisions "help" crypto assets. This bill goes against the design philosophy of peer-to-peer transactions.
I don't think "design philosophy" will be enough, though. The points to make might be more like: is the regulation in normal finance fit for purpose? Should there be an electronic version of cash within some limits and could that be partly done with crypto (same discussion as with CBDC at the moment). Should there be a difference between an individual miner and an industrial one?
Failing financial systems can have huge social and policy implications so technical merit is but one consideration.
Yes: because that design philosophy is counter to that of consumer friendly, regulated markets. What will make bitcoin mass market is the ability of regular investors to get involved with the kind of safety net regulations require. The alternative being that bitcoin maintains its already shady reputation as something for money laundering and buying drugs (crack, perhaps?) online. Cleaning up that reputation and its causes is the job of regulation, and it will work.
This proposed regulation doesn't address the problems you evoke, and its an attack on fundamental human rights such as privacy.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/haileylennon/2021/01/19/the-fal...
The regulatory system, and people who are ok with deferring to it in its existing incarnation (i.e. the revolving door between people within TBTF bailouts-every-day with "open" "market" operations banks [where these cash dollars inevitably end up] and the people who "look" after them system), are fine with this because slaps on the wrists and fines are considered the cost of doing business and there can't be anyway possible to live and exchange value without them being involved under the guise of "protection" or "else" racket.
Robin Hanson would probably call this phenomenon a form of "Elite Tax" on society. [0]
[0] https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/08/how-high-our-elite-ta...
This is a trap I've seen many technical folks on HN fall into - they define "useful" along the lines of "beneficial", or "productive", or "worthwhile", rather than simply "is used". Think of casino tokens. They have no intrinsic value, and can only be used within very limited set of environments, so you could think of them as useless in the strict sense. But that doesn't stop large numbers of people using large numbers of them on a regular basis, and the operators make hundreds of billions a year from the people using them, so they are "useful" in the sense of "being used" to serve a strong human desire (just not to make the world a better place).
So, sure, cryptocurrency startups can innovate a new way of making money. But it doesn’t make them useful. One could argue it doesn’t even make them not harmful.
Those are huge valuable use cases. However it doesn’t follow that we should necessarily facilitate those uses.
To my thinking, provably fair casino games are a useful innovation that sprang from cryptocurrency. Decentralized poker is another. If you find the entire global gaming industry useless, then I guess those are also useless innovations. Again, that's a value judgment.
I don't think it's fair to conflate the people/businesses trying to profit from the crypto speculation craze, pyramid shemes or shitcoins, with e.g. businesses that want to accept crypto to avoid paying a % of their income to Visa. Yet that's what this law would do.
Very good point about the provably fair casino games. I didn’t even know they exist. However note that casinos are regulated too - you can’t eg serve minors.
(This question often leads to moving goalposts and quibbling over definitions of "useful innovations".)
Or as it is otherwise known, abide by the same KYC rules as banks.
I'd guess the vague wording is to allow regulators and the judiciary to respond flexibly to changing practices. It might be broad but it isn't poor lawmaking: it does exactly as it intends to. Even using brokerage as an analogy makes sense to respond to a system in which by design almost everyone of significance is a middleman of some kind.
Fundamentally this is what will allow bitcoin to thrive: this is part of the process of becoming legitimised. It isn't what the crypto-libertarians hoped for, but what they hoped for in the beginning was endless deflation, untaxable income and speculative gains. It wasn't good for anyone but them.
This is a step to something better, namely a new financial system in which upstarts are able to enter quickly and on technical merit alone. That is worth a lot, and won't happen without bitcoin entering the regulated mainstream.