Hacker News Reader

Comment by sprafa | Hacker News Reader

Governments can easily ban and pursue anti-crypto measures to prevent anything such as money they can't control.

Yannis Varoufakis said it best: the idea of apolitical money is a fiction and a dream. Money has always been associated to and controlled by governments. Bitcoin currently is actually heavily manipulated/moved by Tether which is controlled by Bitfinex.

View on HN

I agree governments will try to ban fixed supply currencies but I don't believe they will succeed.

China still can't stop its citizens accessing the open internet on VPN. North Korea still can't stop its citizens smuggling wikipedia into the country on USB sticks. Governments won't be able to stop citizens storing their wealth in fixed supply currencies.

> Bitcoin currently is actually heavily manipulated/moved by Tether

[citation needed]

It was an article on hacker news. I cba to find it but will link if I do. Of course it’s important to provide sources.

Bitcoin is absolutely political. Its genesis block is a link to news denouncing banking corruption on iceland.

Yes Tether moves Bitcoin because it's literally people in Asia who want to dump their fiat to buy Bitcoin. There is no grand conspiracy here, people tried to claim Tether were printing money out of thin air to drive up BTC but even the NYSAG had a look at their operation and found no such result.

>Yannis Varoufakis said it best....

Any links to support your last two assertions ? I'm interested in checking them out.

I saw him in person in london and he was asked about Bitcoin. As the last sentence of his answer he said and I’m paraphrasing: “If you’re asking about the idea of apolitical money [in relation to Bitcoin] I think that’s a fantasy”. I’ll try and see if he ever said something similar in other settings but I remember connecting it to what I was reading around the same time which was David Graeber’s Debt: a History book where he presents a similar anthropological-historical argument.

I was thinking in part about the bit where you claim bitcoin is manipulated by Tether/Bitfinex

There's a number of people who make this claim, some of them leaning towards more credible [0], some hysterical [1].

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/technology/bitcoin-price-...

[1]: https://medium.com/@bitfinexed

Reply on news.ycombinator.com