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Comment by nathias | Hacker News Reader

Decentralized currencies are legal (outside of Turkey)? How is that an utopic assumption?

They are legal, for now. Once crypto becomes big enough to actually affect the changes it seeks to, we will see legislation shooting it down. Turkey is just one of the first examples.

The cat's out of the bag now. Cryptocurrencies will kept being used in tyrannical regimes even if under wraps, and governments will try to rein in to keep them under "control" in the rest of the world, but they're very much here to stay.

I expect stronger condemnation towards "anonymous" cryptocurrencies (Monero, Zcash et al) and making onboarding/offboarding for them more difficult, but that's about it.

You're saying the US legislation will directly attack the multiple $100Billion+ public traded companies in the crypto space? (Assumption is that Coinbase won't be the last company in crypto to go public).

I don't see that happening anymore. There's too many startups with too many smart people working in the space and a LOT more people (including the legislatures) invested in Crypto.

The current US administration nuked Canada's Keystone XL pipeline investment ($8 billion) with the stroke of a pen (due to climate emergency concerns). There is less crypto value intertwined in public securities than that (roughly $4 billion), ignoring Coinbase's valuation (which, if crypto is outlawed, I'm unsure the government would place much value in maintaining; there’s a reason executive insiders cashed out significant portions of their equity holdings at listing).

But, if you believe otherwise as a capital market participant, buying and holding Bitcoin is a fine play to back such a belief.

The US Navy has 11 aircraft carrier groups protecting the USD status as the world's reserve currency.

History suggests that won't last forever, but it probably won't be COIN shareholders or activist hedge funds that forces a regime change as big as that.

Why don't they do it now, rather than wait for it to inevitably become a problem?

Utopic means something that is currently not real. If crypto is outlawed it will still exist, its just that the infrastructure would probably change.

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