Governments do stupid things all the time, and Crypto currencies is a great technology to keep governments honest. Even if most activity remained illegal (It won't) it would STILL be a beneficent technology. This illegal business is done with or without crypto, regardless.
A government once made being a Jew illegal and that was bad.
Therefore any government making anything illegal is bad.
That appears to be your logic, or am I missing something?
Why are drugs illegal? In a large part because black people used them. Also in part, because it threatened the traditional American way of life people were attached to.
Other than that, you need internet for your transactions. Guess who has the power to control the grid? Crypto does not make you independent in absolut terms. There might always be a way to access the internet, but only for those capable - and this won't be the one you're buying food from.
For now. Top level domain registration has already moved to crypto. Elon is working on Starlink. Wireless data transfer technologies are coming for a peer based internet infrastructure.
At this rate, I don’t know if that’s ever going to come about.. looks like it’s just gotten bogged down in ways to increase its value at the cost of its utility..
Even theoretically, how can they do this? I don't see it happening, even setting aside the much rehashed mining electricity consumption issue.
Yeah, theoretically it just used $2 worth of electricity somewhere in the world, but I’m pretty sure PayPal is going to do something nefarious with the $100+ you’d have to give them for the same service
All the hype benefits of pretending to use blockchain, without ever actually using it.
The tldr is thst Lightning is as safe as bitcoin because it uses bitcoin under the hood.
The website you linked is just a collection of random (and often contradictory, just read a few of the “energy” topic) opinions posted on medium.
The person you’re replying to was (sarcastically? I would’ve been) suggesting a solution, which isn’t any of those things.
As there are different ways to use a thing, and everything I’ve seen of Lightning (network not cable) is using the Blockchain in roughly the same sense as a USD denominated bank that happens to not ban accounts from trading Bitcoin uses the Blockchain — i.e. it does, but it’s very much also pretending — this seems reasonable, if not literal.
Freicoin failed to gain any appreciable adoption on the open market. Despite what people claim — e.g. “currency is supposed to be inflationary, cuz greater good” — when it’s their money on the line, they never choose inflationary money if they can easily opt out of it.
The failure of Freicoin underscores the reality that inflation is an anti-feature of money. No one actually wants inflation — if they have better options, they avoid it every time.
When the US government went off the gold standard, they doomed themselves to a Bitcoin future, because suddenly everyone could see the government’s money was backed by nothing. And if US dollars are backed by nothing, what stops a software developer from launching a competing money which is also backed by nothing? They removed all barriers to entry.
Now that everyone knows government money is backed by nothing, every available currency in this world has become an embarassingly hollow confidence racket. It’s merely a matter of whether you believe private sector confidence games made by competent engineers deliver superior technical/economic qualities compared to government confidence games.
Really, why would you want to hold a money in which a tiny group of people fully control the extent to which your money is debased year after year, when you could instead rely on an apolitical computer algorithm not controlled by anyone with a supply schedule known fully in advance which is auditable in real time using freely available open source software? Doesn’t that sound like a better form of money to you?
Visit “WTF Happened in 1971” [1] for another look at the impact of inflationary economics and currency debasement on middle and lower class people.
That is, people only accepted dollars in the understanding that convertibility wouldn't be suspended, just like they accepted the historical money that Freicoin was modeled after before knowing they'd do the Silvio Gesell scheme. It's an open question whether we've accurately modeled the full knock-on effects of reneging on the promise that got the currency off the ground (though personally I agree with you).
I don't like taxes either, but I also like living in a developed country. Inflation is a kind of tax, so nobody likes it, but at the same time pretty much everyone likes having what this tax provides (in the case of growing money supply, it's the ability to have money at all in circulation in the economy for the layperson).
Interestingly enough those policies where grounded in the same ideological background as today's crypto enthusiasm: Austrian economics.
In the 70's, Keynesian's political influence died (because of inflation haters), and so died the golden age of America, and the lower-income families spiralled to straight poverty. Now, after the 2008 crisis, Keynesianism is in charge again, and some people are really bullish with crypto for ideological reasons (because they've drank too much of the 80-90's propaganda comparing Keynesianism with Communism, really). But using lower and middle class persons as an argument reveals either poor historical knowledge or bad faith. It's pretty ironic anyway.
Year 1, you have $X dollars with $Y - 1 purchasing power.
Etc.
$Y > $Y - 1
Inflation is an anti-feature.
> What can it do for me?
It really sounds like you’ve never held Bitcoin. HN can change that for you really quickly if you’re open to it.
Currencies compete, and ones with inflation which punish holding the currency over the long term are fundamentally less user-friendly.
As long as inflation is low enough, people don't really care about it in general because there salary increases as much (and given than the average American has much more debt than saving, the inflation is actually a gift to them).
So I talked about workers, but how about investors and entrepreneurs? Say I have $10 million today sitting in a bank account. I can either let it sit idle, losing value to inflation every year, or invest it somewhere where it can create value. Now if the value of my $10 million increases in real terms (meaning that my purchasing power will naturally increase when time passes) the most rational thing to do is not to invest that money. It's actually unlikely that my investment will pay off anyway, because the amount of money spent by people will decrease year after year (because that's what deflation means).
I don't think the US is close to spiraling into authoritarianism within my lifetime or my children's lifetimes, but I would caution against rounding the tail risk to zero. Political change is glacially slow, except when it isn't.
Well, after 500 years...
Here is another notion. If you want to be anonymous you have to use anonymous protocols. If you explicit want to be able to track the movement of the tokens you are providing, like if you are a government who wants to ensure money is not moving to incorrect places, this is enabled easily and openly through crypto protocols.
I didn't meant the Nazi Germany thing to be a strawman, I was trying to be humorous while also bringing a historical example of the failings of government that is un-doubtable.
You should keep in mind. Public traceability is the default mode of Crypto. Public ledgering is the foundation of crypto protocols, after all. Only Monero has emerged as a viable anonymous product, and the one most traded on the dark net.
It’s incredibly hard to take anything you said after that seriously. Heck, you just made the exact same logical leap that anti-vaxxers are using to oppose vaccine mandates in Canada. That’s not good…either for dialogue or humanity.
>Heck, you just made the exact same logical leap that anti-vaxxers are using to oppose vaccine mandates in Canada.
At least I'm consistent then. Can you point out where my logical leap is?
You're comparing that to the possibility of banning a currency? There are no parallels between this and the Holocaust. You're consistent, but you're still wrong.
You can’t just default to offensive and think people will trust your silly financial ideas. It’s usually the opposite. Good job promoting your ideas.