That's a defensible position. But how does that justify the government going to "total war". There are plenty of things that have no scientific or technological application. Reality TV, social media, fashion, nightclubs, sports, bakeries, those stupid outfits people dress pets up in.
At what point did people stop saying "it's a free country"? So you don't like some thing and don't see much merit in it. At what point did people's knee-jerk response to that change from "not my cup of tea, but you do you, man" to "that thing is completely worthless, everyone who likes it must be an idiot, and therefore the government should abolish it"
As the usefulness is very doubtful but the energy consumption is utterly real, that is a net negative for the environment.
The electronic garbage, too, a huge problem.
Even if you believe in a policy response, wouldn't you agree that it'd be better specifically target proof-of-work blockchains rather than crypto in general? Ironically this bill may actually do the opposite. It places a much higher burden of DeFi and stablecoins, which are mostly Ethereum native. It will probably shift usage to large centralized exchanges, which generally favors PoW based Bitcoin.
But, in this case, even if the loss of a beautiful peace of engineering is always a pity (but it is not even lost, because the source code itself has no reason to be forbidden!), I don't see really what is the loss for the world.
As I said in another comment, if you use a VPN, you can access preexisting online banking like PayPal, and to it while escaping surveillance and censure from any dictatorship you live in.
So e.g. if you reimplement whatever usage you found for some Ethereum contracts, in a non-blockchain technology, then you can just access it through VPNs whenever that becomes necessary.
Precedents: the war on drugs, crusades against porn, alcohol prohibition, the war on terror, mandatory minimum sentencing, etc.
It's a lynch mob mentality writ large and allows reckless legislators and police to gallop right over all kinds of civil boundaries that very much exist for a reason.
A much narrower set of solutions could address your concerns: a tax on proof of work mining, a ban on the sale of hardware whose sole purpose is cryptocurrency mining, or a ban on domestic exchanges converting money to/from cryptocurrencies that use high-resource proof of work mechanisms.
I see no reason to ban proof of stake or other consensus mechanism cryptocurrencies, and stepping up enforcement of existing KYC/AML regulations would help fight money laundering.
I also must point out that real estate, sham art auctions, sham investments and businesses, and numerous other mechanisms collectively account for the vast bulk of all money laundering. Cryptocurrency is a niche player. It's also a niche player in the street drug market where the vast majority of transactions use physical cash.
As far as bubbles and speculative manias go... it's legal for an adult to buy a lotto ticket (that is run by the state!) or go to a casino (permitted and regulated by the state). This is no worse. I might support raising taxes on short term speculative sorts of financial games, but those would also need to be applied to high frequency trading and speculative games run by hedge funds in conventional markets. Those are much larger than anything in crypto.
I say all this as a mostly cryptocurrency skeptic.
Cannot make generalities of course, but still.
Cool, but there are plenty of financial, economic, and political applications of blockchain that will benefit humanity. Just because you don't understand the use case doesn't mean it doesn't have one.
It's that the current use cases can be either replaced by preexisting less compute-intensive tech, or that the usage is just meaningless (gambling-like speculation, failed attempt at anonymity, tax avoidance, etc).
However my comment is as well a call to everybody to think about it!
I know I'm not very brilliant, so if anybody can do a favor to the world and find out something interesting, I'd be extremely happy :)
The fact that you've binned all the usage into the "meaningless" category means you don't understand the use case at all. It's an alternative to the current hegemonic global financial system centrally controlled by the USA. You might think it's useless but plenty of people disagree and are using it in a meaningful way.
You put on a facade of humility and objectivity but your bias against cryptocurrency is pretty blatant.
Can you call this biased?
And what you call financial hegemony is only the corollary of the commercial interconnection between world's countries, and the fact that the USA manage the biggest lender bank ever (the IMF).
That would still be the same using a BTC-based IMF.
PS: There would be no BTC-based IMF, just like there's no gold-based IMF. That's literally the whole point of Bitcoin - decentralized finance with no need for an International Monetary Fund regulating its monetary policy.
What I honestly don't know is if there exist useful algorithms making usage of all these hashes produced by BTC-mining machines.
It's a very precise challenge. And it could change the face of the industry. I'm for real.
For example, any possible usage in mathematics? Or maybe in physics, by switching in a different space to perform the calculations? I'm just throwing ideas.
Figure a world where you cannot use these machines for BTC anymore, because "regulations". Then, what do you do with them? Throw them? What a waste!
Now you understand my point?
It's been hugely beneficial for science from a theoretical and academic POV. Just like space exploration has no obvious benefits but fertilizes the field of engineering with new technology, cryptocurrency is currently doing the same to Computer Science.
And E-waste is a huge problem in general, it's not specific to bitcoin. Online gaming with powerful GPUs has zero benefit to society and also generates lots of useless energy consumption and e-waste. Why don't we brick all of the playstations instead of a whole financial ecosystem?
Assuming you work in tech, you must be aware how similar attitudes existed (within tech, as well) about what the internet itself would provide.
How are you so certain that:
A) you understand all the possible directions a new, network-effect driven tech could take in its applications
B) none of them add value to humanity
C) there are no parallels in your statement to "well horses work fine, why do I need cars."
I honestly hope those usages exist. I really do. But now I don't think they do.
But, frankly, even for Internet itself everybody could see the benefit quite early.
Anyway, if you do find interesting uses that are not replaceable by simpler things, you would save a lot of garbage!! And thus would do a favor to the environment.
So yeah I hope I'm wrong.
This is not a new conflict. Democracy was an algorithmic victory until powerful people learned to subvert it. So too was religion, money, laws etc. This is how civilization advances. Cryptocurrency is a pure thing, an algorithmic method of storage, control and distribution of value, that came about because the old ways were failing.
Now the old powers are fighting back. It’s important to realize that this is the only reason that cryptocurrency has any speculative value at all.
If the treasury / federal reserve had seen bitcoin and adopted a protocol for algorithmic control of the money supply, and a safer wallet for dollar holders, then Bitcoin would have zero value, and the Silk Road would never have happened. If they had seen ethereum, and adopted smart contracts to replace the opaque banking and investment industry, then Ethereum would have zero value, and the iron finance rug pull would never have happened.
This is not about revenue; the treasury balance is overflowing. It’s not about keeping us safe; violent crime is nowhere on the agenda. It’s not consumer protection; the SEC refuses to ever go after the many VC-backed mega rug pulls pushed on retail investors as utility tokens. This is simply about power. They’re not afraid of scammers and criminals. They’re afraid of people like you shifting anger from the obvious canards to the bigger picture.
They’re not out to destroy cryptocurrency either. They want to control it so that they can keep siphoning money out out of people trying to mitigate the problems that their own monetary policy caused, just like 401k of the 90s. I say this to point out that you will not get what you want out of this. It will just become a bigger scam on everybody, established and protected by the full force of the law.
I wonder who it is exactly that you think is looking out for you in all of this.
Just because you or I don't see the use case doesn't mean something should be illegal or that we should go to war with it.
We've made this mistake before (prohibition, the war on drugs). If people want to waste their time/money on X, that's on them.
Bitcoin is helping humanity right now as I type. There are millions who live under authoritative regimes that do not have access to banking services. Bitcoin gives anybody with an internet connection the ability to hold, save, and transfer value. You are condemning something you do not understand. Bitcoin is a technology that improves human rights.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jul/31/out-of-co...
I put it bluntly sorry, but to be more explicit:
because of its volatility, BTC is very difficult to adopt for real transactions.
Also, with a simple VPN, you access PayPal and you're good to go.
I'd argue that the real tech saving the world right now is the VPN.
Even to use BTC somehow you will need VPN, because those dictatorships will block the IPs.
Over $2.4bn in value transferred, but you're telling me no one is using it? Transfer in BTC and convert to a stable coin if you're worried about volatility. Also Nigeria's currency, the naira has a 12% inflation rate. I'm not sure holding BTC is more of a risk than a currency that's guaranteed to lose 12% of its value each year.
A VPN will not protect you if PayPal decides to freeze your account. It will also not hide any of your transactions from PayPal.
Most likely, those are scammers of other illegal activities and they hoard as much as possible of BTC without really caring how much exactly it amounts to.
Also Nigeria is not an oppressive regime.
Edited: ok it's oppressive. However it's still somehow a democracy (with all the constraints of an islamic democracy).
PayPal has competitors, so they will be more than happy to take you as a customer if PayPal banned you.
> Last October, Nigeria was rocked by the largest protests in decades, as many thousands marched against police brutality, and the infamous Sars police unit. The “EndSars” protests saw abuses by security forces, who beat demonstrators, and used water cannon and teargas on them. More than 50 protesters were killed, at least 12 of them shot dead at the Lekki tollgate in Lagos on 20 October
> The clampdown was financial too. Civil society organisations, protest groups and individuals in favour of the demonstrations who were raising funds to free protesters or supply demonstrators with first aid and food had their bank accounts suddenly suspended.
> Feminist Coalition, a collective of 13 young women founded during the demonstrations, came to national attention as they raised funds for protest groups and supported demonstration efforts. When the women’s accounts were also suspended, the group began taking bitcoin donations, eventually raising $150,000 for its fighting fund through cryptocurrency.
> Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter and a prominent advocate of cryptocurrencies, reshared the FemCo bitcoin donation page, further drawing the ire of Nigeria’s government, which last month suspended Twitter in Nigeria.
I edited my comment though to reflect that, yes they are oppressive as they do shadowy things with the police and kill people. There is probably a mix of maybe-unregrettable (killing dangerous religious extremists political opponents) and regrettable (killing anti-islam feminists) events.
Nigeria is an extremely violent society. Think Mexico.
So police violence, if regrettable, is pretty much a corollary.
Sorry but it does not seem weird to you, that among all the dictatorships on Earth, only the scammers' paradise Nigeria has adopted cryptocurrencies at a large scale? Why not Cuba?
About feminist activism: okay but then what about in other muslim countries, where the problem is similar? Why is it in Nigeria that the adoption is so big?
My point is that these citizen organizations could have just used VPN+PayPal very easily for their activism, but it's because BTC was already mainstream among the omnipresent scam businesses, that they had the idea to try.
It doesn't matter if you use VPN with your paypal account, you can still be locked out of your account and your funds frozen. This is not true of bitcoin. No one can freeze your bitcoin, no one can prevent transfer.
But most people depend on platforms to use BTC, so it's the same problem as with PayPal.
Also when I say PayPal, think "all PayPal-like services", including all the competitors.
In the cases where users were banned, PayPal did not prevent them from migrating their funds to others forms, so it's not really freezing.
Let's take China instead of Cuba because there are more data. In January 2021, Nigeria made 32% of BTC exchanges, whereas China only 7%. That shows you there is really some effect independent from the population size and from the nature of the political regime.
Not all PoW is hash based. Some, like Cuckatoo Cycle [1], are based on writing and reading random bits within hundreds of MB of memory, and ASICs for such PoW are dominated by SRAM, which can in principle be repurposed.
As they are less compute-intensive, the benefit is more likely.
I understand that you feel uneasy to theoretically depend on these companies, even if in practice you encounter no real difficulty.
Your fear is unnecessary... unless you do things really frown upon. Even porn and sex services are successfully using some of the online services I quoted above.
For hitmen and substances I don't really know, but those are really frown upon.
I don't see any scientific or technological application that could benefit humanity and would be developed from blockchain technology.
I tried very hard to figure out uses for the hash machines once the cryptocurrencies will disappear, but sadly I could think of none. All of this silicon, these PCBs, will just be junk.