Hacker News Reader

Comment by oceanplexian | Hacker News Reader

Sure Crypto backed by a particular company might not happen, but I don’t see BTC and similar P2P blockchain currencies going anywhere. It’s about as easy to stop as digital piracy, which is to say in other words physically impossible to regulate.

View on HN

The US has a tremendous amount of power in the world financial system. If they want to inhibit crypto currencies, they can make it illegal to use credit cards to buy them, illegal for US banks to transfer to or from an exchange, and illegal for US banks to deal with any bank in any country that allows such activity, or any bank that deals with another bank that allows it.

It was illegal to privately own actual gold anywhere in the world as a US citizen between 1933 and 1975. That's absolutely an approach they could take.

Well, that depends. You could have gold teeth, and jewelry, so if you were really determined... though having all your teeth hollowed out and filled with gold doesn't strike me at scalable strategy, at least not unless you have a lot of kids. But all that was also only because we were on the gold standard. Which, contrary to gold-bug belief, wasn't immune from currency manipulation. The US government arbitrarily increased the value from about $20/ounce to about $30/ounce at on point, making the government suddenly richer in a way not much different than printing more money in today's fiat system.

They can't make it illegal to work for cryptocurrencies. Or to spend them for digital services like content, anonymous server hosting, or paying people for work. It's just not possible without destroying cryptography itself

Corroborating ineedausername, Wikileaks seemed like they were unstoppable defying governments and all. Then, they said they were about to humiliate one of the U.S.'s most powerful banks. Then, Mastercard, Visa, and Paypal cut off all donations to them. Then, Wikileaks started dying off.

The government and card networks might do something similar. They could get SWIFT in on it, too, since they cooperate with governments and mostly profit from traditional banks.

Exactly. Imagine MasterCard and Visa blocking Facebook the merchant so advertisers can no longer pay Facebook. I'm sure Facebook will drop Libra like a hot potato.

In short, governments are the real crooks.

I just checked and wikileaks.org is still alive and well. In fact a few years ago I donated crypto to them as a middle finger to the payment processors. Wikileaks is a perfect example of why banking regulations are ineffective when people can simply bypass said payment processors with crypto.

You don't have to stop the blockchain. You just have to prevent the tokens from being exchanged for dollars which is a lot easier.

This would have the singular affect of forcing the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem into the black market, where it would thrive alive and well. Likely doing more harm than good in the process by fueling violent cartels to wreak havoc, as is still happening with the war on some drugs

That makes no sense, cryptocurrencies are already being used for illegal purposes.

It does make sense. There's a difference between say 50% of all crypto transactions being black market ones and 100% of them being so, and I don't think the 100 would be the same size as the 50 is now, in other words some of the legal trade would for sure move into the black market.

I don't get the point

Cryptocurrency ecosystem is already out of the regulations and mostly a black market

Not really, Coinbase is pretty big and perfectly legal.

What about cash though? Isn't that stuff used for black market?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com