Forbes on why we need to shut Bitcoin and all other cryptocurrencies down | Hacker News Reader

Forbes on why we need to shut Bitcoin and all other cryptocurrencies down

forbes.com

21 pointstiuPapa15 comments

The title is a little misleading. It makes it sound like this is some kind of official Forbes position piece or even the opinion of Steve Forbes himself, but it's just a Forbes contributor. There are many of those and they're really just glorified bloggers. The disclaimer is there for a reason: "The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer."

It's odd to even include that in the title. Stories from e.g. the New York Times do not usually have a title starting "The New York Times on..."

Sorry, really bad choice of words on my part.

So the argument comes down to "if we can't stop criminals from using it, it should be illegal"?

That seems pretty weak...

It's simple really.

Make everything illegal.

Crypto. Encryption! Guns. Social media!

If terrorism has taught us anything, it's that security is more important than freedom.

I'd hardly say that's the lesson terrorism has taught us. It taught us the people make laws that value security over freedom. I very much disagree that it's the correct response or 'more important'.

“We must make all cryptocurrency as we know it today illegal.” A feature of crypto is its resistance to regulation. Go ahead and try to make it illegal. It may reduce the price but the technology won’t go away. That cat is already out of the bag.

And unless I’m misunderstanding this article, what he says applies to all malware. If I’m not mistaken malware scanners now look for malware mining software.

The author is just demonstrating that he doesn’t understand crypto.

Bitcoin's value these days is tightly coupled with its exchange value. Crypto is resistant to regulation and decentralized; exchanges are not. (yes there are decentralized exchanges with close to no volume, and LocalBitcoin, but the lion's share goes through exchanges that rely on the traditional banking system)

All you need to do is make ACH transactions for virtual currency illegal and you'd rip the reasons for the mainstream to use it out of their hands. It would still exist; the technology is the same at $20 as $20,000. It could still be used for a barter/digital economy, but you'd kill speculation.

I wasn't speaking about its value though. Just saying that it can't be made completely illegal. There will always be crypto around in some form.

It was one of the best ways to get one's wealth off the island of Cyprus in 2013 during their banking crisis. There was a freeze on transferring wealth to other nations from the island, so islanders bought BTC instead.

"Life, uh, finds a way." ~Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park

I agree that Bitcoin couldn't be made illegal. I suspect if there's a drive to contain Bitcoin, it would at the banking level; driving down the price would presumably have the desired effect (making coinware untenable)

The whole point of Bitcoin is to avoid petty self-important fascist central-control freaks like the author (apparently a Mr Bloomberg writing on Forbes just to confuse people).

Blockchain is probably the best system for establishing distributed trust in Byzantine conditions since the Freemason's secret handshake. It will take more than a whining blog post to make it go away.

1. The author does not acknowledge the existence of non-POW crypto assets.

2. Illicit mining is easy to detect and mitigate.

3. If you can't stop it, make it illegal? Sounds hardly like a compelling argument.

I'd much rather have an illicit miner on my system than any other kind of malware/rootkit. At least the miner has an incentive to not do bad things to my system and data, and leave the network mostly unused to avoid detection.

On the other hand, mining still takes a lot of energy and drives up GPU costs ...

http://archive.is/KA3Cq - Mirror that you can see.

Looks like the author missed out on the initial crypto euphoria, and now wants up take it out on those who did

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