You might not like cryptocurrency, but this is akin to the infrastructure bill having a provision classifying anyone "responsible for and regularly providing any service effectuating encryption of information" as a munitions-dealer -- with wide downstream implications on (1) open source software, and libraries like OpenSSL, etc, and (2) vague enough to cover pretty much every webmaster who uses TLS certificates.
I'd feel a lot more sympathetic if crypto uses cases didnt predominantly fall into those two camps (as is the case for cryptography).
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
It's really much simpler than people make it seem.
https://www.google.com/search?q=encryption+munitions+1990s
And of course the t-shirt:
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Anyone who has access to the internet can use the above (and it's just few examples, more on https://ethereum.org/) without any arbitrary restrictions set by any governments.
How can you look at these things and not be in awe?
And how on earth can somebody be so confident about something yet know so little about it?
Gaining interest on cryptocurrencies by providing liquidity so other people can speculate on cryptocurrencies, prediction markets (literally gambling on cryptocurrencies), NFTs (speculating on infungible cryptocurrency tokens), and some virtual game where you can further speculate on NFTs with a touch of gamification.
Nothing seems to tie into any real world usefulness, everything ties back into itself where the core is always 'will the value of my internet coins go up'.
The only single useful thing cryptocurrencies can do is you can buy drugs from the darkweb, semi-anonymously, or maybe completely if you use something like Monero.
Also if you plan to buy a house, a bank can give you a mortgage over let's say 25 years where information about your identity, income and credit history is used as a risk assessment, and the loan is backed by the whole existing legal system where your home can be repossessed if you fall behind on payments. You can get a LTV ratio of even 95% in some cases.
How would this work in a decentralized way ever? On the other hand, if you already have, let's say 500k in the bank to buy the house outright, why would you involve cryptocurrency in the transaction. The counterparty is going to probably want to receive their money dollars in a bank somewhere, are you sure that a bank is not going to ask any questions when you do your magic conversions to dollars from crypto and try to send someone 500k?
This doesn't integrate into the real world well unless the other person selling wants to receive crypto already and is ready to take upon all the risks themselves that transferring, accepting and holding cryptocurrency entails. At that point you don't need to do the conversion magic anyway.
The reason for involving crypto in this scenario is so you don't have to sell your crypto assets. This will be more useful going forward as platforms allow users to use NFTs as collateral for example.
Cryptocurrencies have allowed me to feed my family back home in Lebanon, in a way that would simply not be possible with out it. I'm not sure if you don't think this happens on a daily basis, or is not of economic value.
One quiet place where blockchain makes sense is shared ledgers between large financial institutions, JPMorgan for example is working a lot on this. It's not about privacy or usurping the social order or whatever imaginative solution to all of society's problems that gets attached to so many other things... it's just a better API between institutions for transferring ownership between themselves, which is a frequent and often awkward (and ancient) tech.
With blockchain you don't need a third party, with big institutions "theft" doesn't make sense. If there is an error and a transaction needs to be reversed it's in everybody's interest to do so and expected to happen from time to time and likely a built in feature.
Simplifying way back end transactions between banks is pretty nice... for banks, but pretty uninteresting to most people because it's just about settling daily balances between institutions and the like which is really boring.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Services_Directive
Usually refusing to share information or API is a business choice. Besides, once you have a closed group, you just have signed transactions ("permissioned blockchain"), and can (must) ditch proof-of-waste. So it barely resembles what people normally think of as blockchain and starts to look more like signed git commits.
When all parties are trusted there aren’t necessarily any crippling tradeoffs, you get mathematically provable ledgers with no need for a central trusted clearinghouse.
I literally know someone who pays their rent with zcash. It is possible to use it as, y'know, currency.
Claiming the BTC protocol is without utility is completely disingenuous.
This is a common sales pitch but it's relying on the listener not thinking about the problem. Any government can prevent you from using Bitcoin by blocking your transactions: every transaction requires a network exchange and the same infrastructure which is used for things like the Great Firewall can trivially stop that as well.
More importantly, however, that's a hypothetical situation for most people here. The realistic threats to think about stem from the difference between you being able to _make_ a transaction and not have any consequences for doing so. Bitcoin requires you to publish a full log of your transactions for your government to see — if you don't report transactions, skip paying taxes, or conduct a transfer with someone on a blacklist, they can use the public ledger as a signed confession.
Every transaction you make can be used to deanonymize you, and that sharply limits the use of Bitcoin because there's no demand for random numbers — only real things you can do with them, which require physical presences which governments control. If your goal is to transfer money and flee the country, never coming back and writing off any friends or family left behind, Bitcoin might help. If your usage is anything else, you're just counting down until you or someone you interact with has their data compromised.
Now, maybe you've also heard the marketing claims about mixers. Think about that a bit more carefully and you'll also realize the problems which make those unsafe in practice: beyond the expense, you're trusting the mixer operator not to be compromised, simply having any transaction linked to one is evidence that you're doing something illegal, and you have to worry about other users of the service using it for crimes which are serious enough to get more investigation than you personally are worth and proving that you were not knowingly helping those people.
If you were running the secret police somewhere, one of the best things you could do would be set up Bitcoin exchange and mixer services and promote them in your country so you'd have people giving you signed evidence of things you probably weren't even aware of.
I don't know how effective you think the great firewall is, but it's definitely not effective enough to "trivially stop" 500 bytes of banned data from being transferred.
For a repressive government, that means that most people will steer clear which makes it easier to filter since you don't have a large volume of innocent traffic complicating analysis and by creating a great mechanism to get people to install spyware by circulating news underground of a great client which is preconfigured to evade the filter.
If this is your threat model, cash is much safer.
you only need to be "on" to make transactions. In the case of sending transactions, you only need to broadcast the transaction itself (500 bytes), with no further traffic needed. The blockchain data is also broadcast via a satellite: https://www.blockstream.com/satellite/
>transferring non-trivial amounts of data
SPV clients require very little traffic, on the order of tens of kilobytes. Full nodes only need to download under 2MB worth every 10 minutes, or 3.33 KB/s. That's very easy to sneak under the radar if need be.
>Do you really think it's that hard to block port 8333 and a list of known hosts
good thing you can run bitcoin as a tor hidden service.
>If this is your threat model, cash is much safer.
Except you need to be in-person to make transactions.
Do you know what economic value means? If there was no economic value, then it wouldn't be used.
Your comment sounds like one that will be hilarious in the not-so-distant future. It's analogous to the whole trope "X technology is useless" or "People will never need more than X amount of memory" type of thing.
Lie. I can receive payments from my foreign customers in a matter of 30 minutes instead of many days via traditional banking services or Draconian fees line PayPal. I can also safely donate to anti-Putin opposition.
Is it possible that there are uses for cryptocurrencies you have not iterated over in your comment?
If I suggest that sub-cent microtransactions are a use of cryptocurrency that I find useful and have implemented in a hobby project, I predict the response will be, "but that's not wildly popular, speculation and gambling are widespread!"
I don't accept that these widespread uses justify prohibition or over regulation. Even if we accept that these popular uses are worthy of prohibition, other developers should not be punished or unduly burdened because of the actions of the majority. This brings us back to the first point, if regulatory burdens are too high, individuals won't innovate.
>There’s nothing you can do with this stuff except speculate, gamble and build obfuscated Ponzis.
>Not offering these services seems like a positive outcome.
>has utterly failed to produce anything of technological or economic value
This reads as, "Prohibit everything I personally dislike or can't fully appreciate"
>Overseas sounds like a fine place to continue this...
"If you don't like it leave the USA", this ignores the chilling effects the US's regulations have around the globe.
Cryptocurrency has been largely unregulated since its inception and it's almost exclusively used for speculation and criminal activity. The barrier to use of cryptocurrency is that it provides nothing of value outside of those use cases, not regulation.
If cryptocurrencies were not burdened by regulations, there wouldn't be the same informal market for person to person, cash to cryptocurrency transactions.
If you know more than someone else, that's great—please share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn. If you don't want to do that, that's fine, but then please don't post.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
“Require new surveillance of everyday users of cryptocurrency;”
What everyday users? There’s nothing you can do with this stuff except speculate, gamble and build obfuscated Ponzis.
”Force software creators and others who do not custody cryptocurrency for their users to implement cumbersome surveillance systems or stop offering services in the United States;”
Not offering these services seems like a positive outcome.
”Create more honeypots of private information about cryptocurrency users that could attract malicious actors;”
Losing your money to malicious actors is a standard part of the crypto experience already. Endless scams and ransomware don’t seem to worry the author.
”Create more legal complexity to developing blockchain projects or verifying transactions in the United States—likely leading to more innovation moving overseas.”
Ah, blockchain innovation, which is somehow so vital to the shining future of mankind, yet has utterly failed to produce anything of technological or economic value with the billions already invested. Overseas sounds like a fine place to continue this pseudoinnovation charade.