Whelp, that's the end of cryptocurrency... probably should sell your HODLings now. If we're going to Patriot Act the crud out of ransomware, Bitcoin is gonna be illegal.
Most drug users are never prosecuted. But the threat of prosecution does very little to affect the quality of their purchase, relative to what it would do to BTC market as a whole.
Outlawing Bitcoin (or cryptocurrency generally) would cause a huge demand reduction. Some coins might adjust supply to compensate, but total crypto "market cap" would surely plummet.
I thought I smelled authoritarianism! Here we see the ultimate purpose of this entire desultory exercise. Having problems online? No backups? Don't fix your pathetic shit; just be the excuse for the USA military-enforcement-imprisonment-industrial complex to oppress everyone on earth. Good grief.
Nations make laws against bad things. People who violate those laws go to jail. A ban on cryptocurrency (or rather, exchanging it for dollars) will be a hell of a lot easier than banning popular intoxicants.
We're done putting up with this particularly pernicious iteration of tulip mania. Time to pull the plug before it does any more damage.
It’s really bot unusual for the law to treat things differently based on the purpose for which they are used when they are “just a database, in essence”.
See? I can do it too.
But yes, everything can be banned eventually. We'll just go back to living in the cave.
What if society determines that cryptocurrency also has negative externalities? You're free to disagree but I just stuck my finger in the air and it's pretty clear which way the wind is blowing.
Here's a thought experiment: If you're a political party that had taken over the government through criminal means such as election fraud or more coercive methods such as a disinformation/propaganda campaign or a coup, the first thing you will do is to make sure that you have control of the money. Since cryptocurrencies are too transparent and undermine the absolute control of state-issued currency, these will be seen as a threat to the criminal government and will be the first thing to get banned.
We can quickly see that the world's worst criminals at the highest levels hate cryptocurrency, and prefer to use the existing paper-based technologies instead, that allow them to be more opaque and retain absolute power.
Good luck pushing that line anywhere other than technolibertarian friendly HN or the various ancap subreddits.
By pointing out that crypto is banned for regular North Korean citizens, did you not just prove my point that it's a worthless tool for countering authoritarianism?
If you don't see how this mean the price will crash, I don't know what to tell you.
Drugs are renowned as a special case when it comes to states' enforcement power. Currency control is not.
Outside failed states, capital controls and foreign currency restrictions have been historically well enforced and followed.
The U.S. banning cryptocurrencies, sanctioning connected individuals and firms and committing to leveling repeated 51% attacks would functionally destroy most cryptocurrencies. (There is zero indication this is being contemplated.)
Are you confusing this with the debate around encryption? That wouldn't surprise me coming from someone who uses the phrase "nocoiner".
Shutting down Coinbase, however, will have no effect on bitcoin or the people who use it. That's the point of bitcoin, and it has been since the protocol was published.
You all are more than free to continue to associate with each other. As long as you're not breaking any preexisting federal laws (let's be honest: most of you are). It's the normie and Wall Street market we are targeting. Good luck maintaining the bull run, sweetheart.
The most precious thought is that one might think to reign in authoritarian capitalists by attacking the one thing created in the last century that has a chance of actually undermining authoritarian capitalism. You don't actually think that, because ITT we see plenty of evidence you're on the other side of this conflict.
You keep focusing on the enforcement itself rather than the goals we hope to accomplish via enforcement. I infer that you have a special fascination for enforcement, but please understand that many people do not share this special fascination with you.
I'm inclined to say Jeff Bezos is no better. But then I remember he and his companies have actually produced some innovations that are legitimately beneficial.
Heck, even in American history we once tried to ban private ownership of gold bullion. The black market price of gold rose substantially.
That's a nonsense comparison. When governments impose capital controls it means their currency is already sinking and it's a last ditch attempt to prevent this inevitable scenario.
BTC valuation is entirely based on narratives about how it's going to replace standard currency in whatever story is popular, and from what I can see right now it's being pumped up by funds who can't find other good investments in this markets and are willing to play with crypto. If it's illegal for US funds/citizens to hold it/be involved with it - the selloff alone would kill the market instantaneously.
There's no reason to think that, say a Japanese pension fund, that's invested in Grayscale is going to say, "oh shoot, guess there's no possible way to allocate to this asset class now". They'll just reinvest that same allocation in a UK or Caymans domiciled fund.
If anything the 85% of crypto investors who aren't invested, will most likely hoard in anticipation of the policy being reversed. For better or worse the US government has extremely low credibility when it comes to long-term policy consistency. Almost any US policy can simply be waited out until Congress/White House flips parties.
Holdings would seem to be more reasonably assumed to be proportional to wealth [0], not GDP. The US has a significantly larger share of global wealth than it does of GDP.
[0] or maybe more-than-linearly related, since less-wealthy people will have more of their wealth in directly-used assets like tools, vehicles, and homes.
Bitcoin market swings on Elon Musks tweets, a full scale ban in the US would obliterate it.
While BTC may burst, it wouldn't go to $1/BTC. it would go to a small percentage of what it is now, but still retain some value.
I haven't bought any Monero, but I saw this website the other day: https://localmonero.co/
If that's legitimate, it seems pretty easy.
I buy Monero by buying Litecoin at any exchange and then swap it for Monero using blocktrades.
Notably, Binance allows buying Monero directly.
Terrorist financing is illegal. Cash is not.
So there's a lot of reasons the US government just may find themselves happier without it.
[1] https://www.elliptic.co/resources/typologies-concise-guide-c...
[2] https://ciphertrace.com/2020-year-end-cryptocurrency-crime-a...
[3] https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2021-crypto-crime-repor...
There's a ridiculous amount of volume on Bitcoin and it's mostly moving to and from exchanges. There's no way a majority of those are illegal.
Barely. The portability usually ends at country borders.
> Bitcoin is a problem in search of a solution.
Don't you mean "a solution in search of a problem?" Nice Freudian slip, though :)
Coinage used to be more portable in the days of precious metal coins. But honestly I’ve had very little barriers in converting cash. It’s a solved problem.
but the computational power is nessisary for the network to function in a manner that is provable to new nodes. Because you can use a digital signature to confirm a transaction happened after some time, but not before some time.
I don't think cash is a solved problem within the context of computer networks. If I could transfer money using a program by using a digital signature, I would be satisfied, but anyone who can get access to my credit card numbers (and name, billing address and other open source info) can make purchases in my name. And you of course must rely on the fractional reserves of some central entity.
If ransomware gangs are directly or indirectly targeted by OFAC, that would have massive ramifications.
Doesn't existing anti-terrorist financing (ATF) law cover this?
What happens when a company is a victim of a ransomware attack and OFAC puts the extortion wallet on an exclusion list?
That wallets gets tainted? Its coins become less valuable? Marked wallets have been an obvious thing coming down the pipes.
So now, know your customer turns from “be sure I don’t send USD to a specially designated national” to “be sure I never accept crypto from a burnt wallet.”
You have to declare it. You’ll probably get follow up questions on how you got it and why a wire doesn’t work. But otherwise, large quantities of cash transit the U.S. border all the time.
Bitcoin is easier than hard cash to track. There's no need to make it illegal. I suppose you could argue that government is heavy handed enough to simply ban the mechanism by which ransomware payments are so easily conducted by. My intuition is that government would prefer to regulate it rather than outright ban it.
Rather it's been the banks that have been clamoring to get a piece of the bitcoin action, not the other way around.