This article should be re-titled "The Political Case for a Blanket Proof of Work Ban".
I don't think it's a terribly strong case but I suppose it depends on whether you agree that crypto is gambling and if you think gambling should banned. Anyway, I think lots of people stupidly speculate on things. I cast my vote by not speculating on those things. Should I be able to stop others from speculating?
It's the same sort of hypocrisy as deplatforming Parler. While I did not weep for Parler, YouTube and Facebook are the largest platforms for alt-right/fascist propaganda. YouTube's "rabbit hole algorithm" is by far the most powerful engine of indoctrination, and while the most egregious stuff has mostly been kicked off the platform it's still full of "soft pill" fascist/racist material. I am not sure things like Qanon or the alt-right in general would even exist (to such a degree) were it not for YouTube.
A ban or tax on proof of work mining is tempting but it would just offshore that activity. I suppose you could ban PoW cryptocurrencies but there are many alternatives.
This is generally a shitty article.
Yes, I think there is a lot wrong within ‘Wall Street’. But those wrongs don’t justify the existence of cryptocurrencies in any way.
And most of all: it doesn’t absolve cryptocurrencies in any way of their terrible impact on our world.
Just the facilating of cryprolocker attacks alone are enough to justify a ban in my view.
For just one example, look at how hedge fund and foreign capital speculation in housing is making a home unaffordable for millions upon millions of people and contributing to middle class decline and homelessness.
It's a bit like making pot illegal when hard liquor and cigarettes are legal. What it really amounts to is the existing parasitic financial industry using the state to remove a competitor to its own gambling and destructive speculation operation.
Argument: X is bad because Y. Counter: But Z is also bad because Y and I don't hear you saying anything about that! Conclusion: So X isn't bad.
E.g. the typical Soviet whataboutism:
Argument: The USSR doesn't respect human rights and that's bad. Counter: A u vas negrov linchuyut (but at your place, you lynch negroes). I.e. the US doesn't respect human rights either. Conclusion: So the USSR isn't bad.
The mere presence of Z does not invalidate the argument that X is bad because of Y. It's irrelevant, which is why tu quoque is just that, a fallacy of relevance.
Inconsistency in these kinds of areas just makes a mockery of the legal system and encourages corruption.
There are tons and tons of other problems with this proposal I didn't get into, such as how cryptocurrency is defined. Are we going to start making data structures like linked lists of cryptographic hashes illegal? In-game virtual currencies? Amusement park tokens tracked in a database? Any law would be either overly broad or trivially circumventable.
Real or perceived hypocrisy doesn't absolve cryptocurrencies in any way. What they are and what they have to account for has to stand on itself, on its own.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
You also seem to be a bit disingenuous: cryptographic hashes don't boil the ocean. Amusement park tokens idem. They aren't used for ransomware.
So this attempt at some kind of slippery slope argument isn't really working, if you would ask me.
When money is at stake, logic and reason is the first to fly out of the window. Whatever necessary to make the grift going will be said.
For every one of these people who bought cryptocurrency and "made something", there is someone - for the sake of discussion, another poor sap with a dead end job - who just bought cryptocurrency and hasn't made anything. And lots more from the second group who have made a tiny minority of crypto owners rich.
"Crypto" - not the underlying tech which is potentially interesting and may have merit in some incarnation - but buying or trading "assets" grounded in the tech, is essentially a quasi-legal pump and dump scheme right now. There is a rich history of securities law that is designed to thwart predatory investment schemes, and all of that has been circumvented by allowing people to trade in these assets.
I generally agree that adults should be able to do what they want, but I don't think we have found a way to balance that with what right now is effectively one big fraud.
Games like second life and Eve did the digital currency thing way before bitcoin. How is a pretend coin you can trade for money different than a pretend game currency you can trade for money?
Because one is traded on the stock market and increasingly accepted in real world transactions?
There was and likely still is, people making livings off earning digital video game currency, selling digital assets and converting it to real money. Not to mention every person that made actual money off mmorpg marketplaces.
Seems like cryptocurrencies just remove the game part and cut right to the economic part. With games, it's the people creating the currency through their actions and time, farming gold, working in Eve, etc. With cryptocurrency it's GPUs and stuff...though I guess technically, your GPU's doing the work for the game currency too.
The concept doesn't seem to have changed, buy make-believe thing that exists only on a computer everybody agrees is worth money and the value of said make believe thing changes based on how many people have or want the make-believe thing.
It doesn't really seem very similar to cryptocurrency to me; could you explain some more about how you think it's the same?
That website appears to me to be very much like an exchange for trading EVE online ISK for USD.
The average rate seems to be between $42-$45 for 5000 ISK.
It seems to be a time based currency where its value is based on a player's willingness to spend time grinding.
DeFi kinda started as decentralized exchanges but seemingly changed into apps which allow you to leverage tokens. This is like gambling for tech geeks. Probably this will die and be replaced by gambling for non-tech savvy individuals.
The more interesting side, for me personally, is powering financial assets on the blockchain. There is still work that needs to be done here.
I’m particularly worried about how easy theft of tokens can be, but I think that is a solvable problem. Perhaps through technical means or perhaps through banks holding your assets and covering you with something similar to FDIC or insurance.
So all-in-all I don’t think it’s fair to call this one big fraud or pump-and-dump schemes. Some are yes but many aren’t. Like the dotcom bubble many will lose all invested money however the general promise and tech will deliver something world changing.
You've got it backwards. You are making health insurance profit-driven, when it should be a government service. So then there would be no "individual's health insurance money" to quibble about.
> Once the government is responsible for the well-being of its citizens, it has weird effects like banning cryptocurrency
Wow, that's one helluva strawperson argument. Governments have always been responsible for the well-being of its citizens.
This idea of blaming hypothetical "stupid people" is trotted out by libertarians who want to punish the poor for dumb behavior, but give the rich a pass for equally-or-more dumb behavior that has a 1,000x more negative impact on society, simply because rich=smart=superior in their minds.
The kind of libertarian who's excited about Bitcoin is the kind that, with Satoshi in Bitcoin's genesis block, criticizes the bailout of banks and thinks they should have been allowed to fail, because that's what would keep them in check and prevent their walking all over regular people.
And yes, your last comment is a strawman because any libertarian who believes in individual choice and consequence also believes the same for businesses and rich people. You're attacking a group of people who exist but that I wouldn't call libertarians.
At the same time, allowing extreme wealth inequality incentivizes stupid behavior on the part of capital (like wasting capital on unproductive speculation, or driving the working class foundation of the population to poverty). Welfare states put sensible checks on capital, and honestly capital should welcome policies that keep the population from doing rash things like nationalizing all their assets out of desperation.
Currency/whatever crypto is, is just a system of trust. Logic is likely to have little to do with the downfall if it comes. Scrolling through the comments the Crypto-religious right is out in full effect and tbh, I understand it. For many people they have moved up many brackets of the wealth ladder and they probably should reject anyone coming for their system with vigor.
I think the downside of the crypto religious complex is going to be, that if any of these emotional arguments (coming to kill crypto) become mainstream and compelling, the tenor of arguments is going to push the crypto and no-crypto sides apart cartoonishly (think modern dems and republicans) and the choices of resolution will have to be loud and final.
Make no mistake, crypto is much closer to a political religious sect than it is a science.
The environmental cost of this - globally decentralized - system is to put it bluntly... negligible. That doesn't matter though, as long as people can be convinced into thinking it's a major issue.
What also doesn't matter is: anyone's opinion. Hegemonic systems will do whatever they need to do to maintain power, and that includes the possibility of banning crypto - even if everyone absolutely loves it.
The only thing Crypto Evangelists should be doing is building the tech and making it ban-proof. Let the nay-sayers bemoan the loss of their crumbling infrastructure, they'll still need a way to function in the modern world.
"BuH GloBaL WaRmInG" - as if any of these people actually give a shit about the environmental impact of industry as they write their AWS Lambdas, get the newest iPhone, order plastic wrapped take out, and buy a new car to make their commutes to the office "nicer". Even if Bitcoin was considered greener than fiat (and it should be, since it's essentially an improvement in EFFICIENCY and therefore LESS WORK to operate), they'd still hate it for one reason or another.
But again, the poorly thought out narratives don't matter. What matters is the conflict between alternative tech and hegemonic tech.
The "green" issue of Crypto mining is a harder regulatory issue for our government to get involved in, though. While on the one hand, I applaud their pro action, on the other hand, the hypocrisy is on a scale almost never seen. A government which has simultaneously rolled back environmental regulation, wildlife areas and expanded oil pipelines, shale extractions, fracking and offshore drilling while continuing a war on "terrorism", which is an ideal, not an enemy. A forever war, if you will. This is a polluter much bigger than crypto miners, so you'll excuse me if I have to take the concern about the environmental impact concern from the Senate all that seriously...... sorry. Went off the track. Either way, there are larger polluters to tackle than Crypto that take less control away from people.
Now if a blockchain's exchange value goes to zero then all that's left is a very expensive data chain.
Crypto currency is backed only by collective euphoria. Not unlike 17th century tulips.
None of the people I interact with and work with are gambling. We avoid that crowd because it's not sustainable nor does it create long-term value.
Why do people look at bitcoin and claim all crypto are equal, throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
Internal combustion engines are already really close to their peak efficiency vs emissions output and they still contribute a huge and growing amount to overall CO2 emissions. We need to design cities to curb the need for cars, replace as many as we can with electric, and design better, more accessible public transportation. Not seek more efficient internal combustion engines and promote their use.
Crypto-currencies account for an abysmally small number of financial transactions in the world. Literally inconsequential. And they chewed up an astounding amount of energy in order to process them. To scale that up to a world where everyone buys their bread and milk and candy bars with crypto-coins is... well not feasible would be the polite way to put it if you still understand physics and the laws of thermodynamics.
I think there are plenty of other reasons to ban crypto-currencies when we get to regulation and protecting consumers.
It wouldn't take much for the governments of the world to shut the whole enterprise down and I think they should.
They launched it as a parallel chain first, but it's going so well they've accelerated the plan to move the rest of the network to it. That's a relatively simple task and should happen in early 2022 at the latest, and possibly this fall. You can judge for yourself how hard it will be: https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/B1mUf6DXO
In my opinion regulatory action against PoW is all but inevitable. Ethereum is a platform, so there are powerful incentives to make it work more efficiently and use less power. Those plans are already well under way and, whenever Ethereum 2.0 gets launched, the power consumption of the crypto sector will drop dramatically and the network will be massively more powerful, attracting subsequent adoption. In this case, miners and developers have aligned interests. That's not the case for Bitcoin. Existing miners benefit from PoW, so I don't expect Bitcoin to migrate without some regulatory arm twisting.
I don't see the difference between that and "The Political Case for a Blanket Cryptocurrency Ban". The outcome is the same. Etherium has not proven proof of stake can work at scale. If it does that will be great. But it's no certain thing and it'll probably mean more Eth forks like Eth classic. Most other cryptocurrencies are tied to bitcoin's ecosystem to have value at all.
I disagree.
The author of the article is the worst kind of statist there is, and many of his arguments fall in the "big brother ought to protect their poor defenseless citizens, whether they like it or not".
The CO2 emission argument is just the icing on the cake.
Bitcoin and proof of work should totally be banned.
I agree that there seems to be a lot of interesting work going on and the ideas of decentralized finance have a lot of potential. At the moment it really is hard to cut through the noise though and from what I can find just searching for an afternoon it looks like a minefield. I'm hoping that the bad stuff will all fade away and something useful will remain.
https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26560626) talks about the Steem/Hive split, and explains how the community democratically overrode the network owner's undemocratic decisions.
Anyway, when you have a democratic (or otherwise subject to popular influence) institution which can do things like "print more money", forfeit some part of existing money, levy taxes etc. - then indeed it's an interesting and potentially positive-in-my-opinion cooperative pooling of resources. Of course then you have the opposite problem, which is the tyranny of the majority, but "you can't grab the rope at both ends".
Not everyone wants to take down banks or destroy fiat.
The truth is that no one uses cryptocurrency for anything. Ethereum is just as much a speculative store of value as Bitcoin is, if not moreso given the numerous competitors it has to contend with — Bitcoin arguably has none.
In a way, “speculative store of value” has merely been whitelabeled under the terms “digital gold” and “defi”. The people who claim increduously they’re buying ETH to do transactions are misrepresenting the situation to an extreme degree.
> Bitcoin and proof of work should totally be banned.
Where is your disclosure statement?
I believe that all cryptocurrencies are at their heart scams.
Proof of stake doesn’t change this dynamic.
As I see it, cryptocurrencies doesn’t actually solve any real, significant problems we face as a (global) society.
And to pick one important thing: they exclusively enable crypolocker randsomeware, and we know their devastating impact.
Dollars are abused too, but the dollar gives so much back, our societies are based on it.
I see no benefit to society of cryptocurrencies and I would really like to see them go.
Nothing good has come from them. Zero.
I can put a virus on someone's computer and make them mail physical dollars or make dead-drops or whatever to remove it, ransomware is not a problem of cryptocurrency.
Your funny James Bond Scenario is just dishonest, you know this doesn’t scale and dead drops won’t protect you. The risk is too high.
While you may enjoy the benefits of a first world currency, check your privilege for just one moment and realise the world is much bigger than you would believe.
"The music video for “Despacito” set an Internet record in April 2018 when it became the first video to hit five billion views on YouTube. In the process, "Despacito" reached a less celebrated milestone: it burned as much energy as 40,000 U.S. homes use in a year."
One youtube video.
https://fortune.com/2019/09/18/internet-cloud-server-data-ce...
At the end of the day it comes down to where people want to put their energy allocations. Large scale Bitcoin and or cryptocurrency mining operations are mostly just other buildings with racks of computers.
Cardano main net has been around a long time. It just doesn't support smart contracts yet.
The Mainnet has 2,289 active stake pool operators, which comes out to >99% decentralized, with 71.09% of the total ADA in circulation being actively staked on those pools ($26.83b/$37.7b). It has an incredibly active and healthy mainnet...
Nothing useful is a HUGE stretch - unless only smart contracts are 'useful'. The ecosystem is new but growing rapidly. Let's circle back to this comment in 1-2 months?
I don't like proof of stake because again, the rich get richer in this scenario, which works against the decentralized core value of cryptocurrency.
In practice this just degrades to a situation very similar to ASICs, admittedly with the benefit that the hardware has a purpose beyond mining and with multiple (uninterested) manufacturers. In that way it is perhaps more decentralized, while also open to additional vulnerabilities. All in all it’s mostly just a way to differentiate from btc on a theoretical point rather than have any real advantage.