https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1532670
One of the posters says the feds will shut it down. I also thought this too. This remains one of the most enduring mysteries of Bitcoin to me. Why has the government taken such a hands off approach?
Beyond Bitcoin, if crypto tokens begin to supplant public stocks (which I'm not saying they will), it would be incredibly foolish to cut off US citizens from those markets
There is no value created, it is just redistributed through rent-seeking. The US might hope that the redistribution goes in its favor if, as you say, more early adopters are in US rather than abroad.
The global effect of rent-seeking is that money gets pulled out of productive enterprises and into non-producing assets, lowering GDP.
Whether or not the easy access to money laundering channels makes up for the lost GDP or makes it worse, I am curious to see.
Why would the US government want to ban Bitcoin anyway?
Bitcoin isn't particularly useful for laundering money because converting to/from fiat in any significant quantity usually requires a Bitcoin exchange and they follow proper AML/KYC procedures (those who don't get shut down.)
Bitcoin is not particularly associated to illicit activities any more so than cash: http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-economy-black-market-sin-rep...
Bitcoin helps the economy: $1+ billion has been invested in Bitcoin/cryptocurrency companies, creating thousands of jobs.
I would say many officials in the government understand Bitcoin is a technology with a lot of potential, and it would be stupid to outlaw it from the start. Watch the November 2013 US Senate hearing on Bitcoin if you want to get a sense of how some officials perceive it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/11/18...
Various proposals to generate anonymity have been created, but with the sky high transaction costs none of them are currently viable.
The Fed swelled their balance sheet to 4.5trillion to bail out the banks. They can just electronically create money out of thin air. Everyone has a price, and when you have ultimate power you're in denial of 95%++ of people's human nature if you don't believe that power does not corrupt.
The fact that this type of fake news is so heavily proliferated and believed damages the ability of working institutions to keep their legitimacy.
Admittedly this is pretty far out in the realm of Wrongthink. Just look at Investopedia or an econ text book, and what they say about the question: does the Fed print money. They say no[1].
This is utterly, undeniably false. After the 2008 financial crisis the Fed's balance sheet ballooned to 4.5 trillion. How did they get that money? I can assure you that they did not (1) take out loans, or (2) produce goods or services at a profit. They electronically debit an account with money, and then go to Wall St and buy what no one else wanted to buy.
What did Gadaffi do? He tried to kick out their central bank that was imposed on them by the UN, by creating a gold standard.[2]
Most elite politicians are not nice people. They don't care about unjust wars, constitutional abuse or torture. They laugh like maniacs at Gadaffi's torture and death[3].
Fake News is just a useful term to disparage Wrongthink.
Every government in the history of this planet has a natural tendency towards cronyism and tyranny. If you take the headlines at face value and don't take the time to actually investigate the legitimacy of the facts then you are no different than any other subject of any other government in history, willingly subjugated to their ideas of what is right and wrong.
1 -
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/082515/who-decides-... 2 - https://www.globalresearch.ca/hillary-emails-reveal-nato-kil...
Now, while I understand why a lot of people like the idea of a gold standard, or really holding static assets like gold or bitcoin themselves (for microeconomic reasons), to suggest that debt based central banking is bad because government are bad is a poor reason simply because of all the macroeconomic good that comes from it for societies. Economies are strong when people spend and invest money in them at higher nominal rates y/y without a decrease in purchasing power. Countries are able to maintain this by using these debt based systems to systematically devalue their currency (such as china has done) to grow their economy and in turn their tax base and public works. When the opposite is done, you get the types of problems japan had when other countries systematically devalued the yen as part of the plaza accord.
Additionally, should all assets be completely static where there is a greater incentive to hold rather than to trade (as is sometimes the case within the housing market, so people systematically fight against new housing as it only devalues their asset), you create a society where people only purchase the goods they need, and in turn those at the top can forever increase their wealth without having to invest it at the same rates they do now.
You should reconsider investigating this idea again.
The rest of your comment argues against deflation and commodity-money which is a straw man: I'm not arguing for that. I'm arguing for sound money controlled by our government, not international banking cartels that print money to give it to the banks (you could replace the Fed with a k-percent rule algorithm, 100% transparency, and 100% reserve banking).
Unfortunately, we've been riding on greater fools for so long that whatever generation is forced to do this is going to feel some financial hardship.
This is diffrerent from file sharing because file sharing does not need a connection to the traditional financial system to be useful for most people.
Hilariously, this is the type of censorship that bitcoin solves.
1. Crypto currency has potential that outweighs it's threat. Being able to transfer funds to people in other parts of the world is of interest to several government agencies. Perhaps crypto currency could help them do this better / more efficiently / whatever than today.
2. They will have to be extremely on top of the situation in order to be able to bring down a crypto currency.
3. Even if they kill one, three others will rise to take the place that it had.
That being said, I guess they could just ban crypto currency and perhaps most people would comply and the ones that were angered couldn't do much else than to watch it crumble.
Because it's something like win-win-win for them?
1. They don't stifle a new technology for no reason.
2. They can always regulate it later, with the added bonus that they'll be able to stick a bunch of people they want to investigate with non-compliance charges for failing to register at the appropriate time. Similarly, how many people do you think are doing their taxes right on BTC? Easy arbitrary audit material if you can ever link their accounts.
3. I'm not sure the government is opposed to digital money that leaves an immutable, public record of cryptographic witnesses to transactions. The pseudo-anonymity isn't worth much against a pervasive global adversary watching all the pipes. They link the BTC to your actions, the keys to your machine, and you may as well have signed a confession.
So there's little incentive to act quickly and lots of incentive to give the radicals into BTC a chance to slip up on OPSEC.