Hacker News Reader

Comment by arlcode | Hacker News Reader

Regulation will happen.

Some Crypto people may believe that they are immune to the governments of the world but they really aren't.

Whoever can kick down your door has the ability to make some rules and especially after a significant economic crash rules will be demanded.

Since crypto doesn't do anything fundamentally new I predict that most of those rules will look like current financial laws "but on the blockchain".

That or the industry will just fizzle out once it turns out that you can't escape the society you are living in.

View on HN

How will the government know whos door to kick down? Your wallet doesn't have a physical address.... unless you're hoarding your money on an exchange

Watch transactions that people make and compare to what they do in real life. It is tedious work and takes time, but governments do similar things to investigates lots of crimes. If you murdered one person you would probably get away with it so long as you are not obvious about it (don't murder your wife - you become the obvious suspect and probably can't hide your trail), but most criminals commit several crimes and eventually all the different trail of evidence add up to an arrest. Likewise if you only have one crypto transaction you won't be found, but for crypto to be useful you need to use it and eventually that leaves enough of a real world trail to figure out who did what.

Hoarding money on exchanges is the only thing you can do with cryptocurrency aside from buying jpegs and maybe (if you're lucky) drugs.

E.g. https://www.nber.org/papers/w29396 points out that only 10% of bitcoin transactions are economically meaningful and only 2.5% do not involve an exchange.

At some point you're going to have to exchange your crypto for physical goods.

> At some point you're going to have to exchange your crypto for physical goods.

Or digital goods (services). Which you can do without providing any real-world identification.

Good luck eating digital goods.

That would be an issue if you only had crypto. It does not in any way negate the fact that there are ways to employ crypto profitably which do not require exposing your real-world identity.

> Since crypto doesn't do anything fundamentally new

Bitcoin, for instance, merely reverts to a scarce accounting standard, like the gold standard, preventing the overburdening of future generations with interest payments incurred by the government, owed to the national bank.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com