Comment by can16358p | Hacker News Reader

Comment by can16358p | Hacker News Reader

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I believe many people who hate crypto are the ones that have a good life in a relatively non(or less)-corrupted government-led society, which might be a good reflection of HN demographics. For them, crypto has no value because I think the biggest value proposition is decentralization, which those people don't need as they don't have a corruption problem to solve. They already have a good income, good country and system to live in, etc.

Add the many scams going on in the web3 space and it's easy to see why most people don't like it.

As a developer who started to turn into crypto recently:

I live in a corrupted country with a corrupted government that has too much power and has no good intentions for its people.

I can easily get crypto tokens or some other form of compensation for doing some work for a crypto company, which usually pays much better than regular work, while exploring new ways of thinking about how money and economy works in the first place.

As a developer I feel enthusiastic about everything crypto can offer, and learning more about Solidity development and inter-chain communications and new scalable layers just excite me even more.

There is not a single reason for me to not love crypto.

It's all about demographics.

> I believe many people who hate crypto are the ones that have a good life in a relatively non(or less)-corrupted government-led society, which might be a good reflection of HN demographics.

Maybe. I hear this a lot too. But as a counterpoint, I happen to live in the USA, and have a pretty good life. I know a LOT of people who have good lives in this relatively uncorrupted society who are going into web3. And who are funded by very well off people in said country.

I'm not saying that web3 can't help people in bad countries. It's that I don't think that's the end goal of a lot of this enthusiasm. Because I don't think those people were trying to help out people in your country before crypto existed (not verified, but I think this is a reasonable belief).

You're very naive if you think that corrupt governments won't have power over blockchain-based technologies.

You're very naive to think that any authority can have power over distributed technology.

BitTorrent is 20 years old, and today you can still download any movie you want from it. Why hasn't any company or government being able to stop it?

It has largely stopped being common though. The supply has also gone down drastically. It used to be easy to find even confidential movies and download them, even for a non tech family. Nowadays only well informed people keep pirating and non-mainstream supply has gone down so much that it is sometimes impossible to find, which is a shame because that supply is also frequently not available through streaming so you just have some DVD on Amazon.

The crackdown on pirating + streaming together really killed the scene at a point where it's no longer an inconvenience for the market actors.

I would say the same is happening with crypto where KYC and AML rules will progressively apply so that you will still have crypto but the "freedom" or lawless use will be so inconvenient that it won't be a problem for governments and financial actors. It just take time for those rules to be set, but there's really not so many complicated things about it.

The belief that code would beat laws is absurd, in the end you live in a physical world. Sure you could try to have an underground crypto that nobody can use officially but would that really be useful?

Exactly, couldn't have said it better myself.

Pretty sure it was purely affordable streaming that killed bit-torrent. Now that the streaming providers are becoming more disparate, and the old media empires are locking everything up behind ten different streaming platforms, each of which require monthly subscriptions, you'll almost certainly see a resurgence in piracy. It's really just the free market at work ;-)

Depends where you are. Somewhere like Germany you just receive a €300 bill in the mail every time you torrent something, this has a definite chilling effect on torrenting. For crypto, with all transactions being publicly available, I see this being even easier to implement.

Not all cryptocurrencies have public transactions (see Monero for example). And next, you still have to link a wallet with a real person. Might be possible, but not necessarily so.

With BitTorrent, you at least have an IP address, which is easier to link with a real person.

What are you talking about? BitTorrent is absolutely alive and well, and the big sites still have everything you want as soon as it airs.

I'm not talking just popular movies; I was getting Battlebots episodes from Rarbg earlier this year, in 1080p, pretty much as soon as they aired in the US.

You don't need control over the platform. Just penalise the users.

If you can figure out who the users are, yes.

> You're very naive if you think that corrupt governments won't have power over blockchain-based technologies.

In the strictest sense: Yes, with enough coercion, a small blockchain could be influenced. However, from a practical standpoint, it simply makes much more sense for said government to follow the FATF's recommendations & implement a CBDC, no blockchains required.

In fact, combined with AML/KYC, said government wouldn't need to bother with dissidents, as they can simply wipe the balances of anyone they deem a threat towards national security.

You're very naive if you think blockchain technology wouldn't become more privacy-friendly to the extent that governments trying to have power over it practically need to give up because it simply would become economically infeasible for them to do that.

Sure governments can't easily control P2P transactions but as soon as you need money to pay taxes, rent, bills, groceries... cryptocurrencies won't take you very far, especially in a country that's banned them entirely.

If it is a corrupt country, why will the ban be effective? Even asking how they will ban it is an interesting technical question, people would have to be cut off from the internet and anything that can run linux.

I live in Australia, and was interested in buying a privacy oriented cryptocurrency the other day. It was an interesting thing to realise that the government can't stop me in the usual way (regulatory pressure on the exchange to not let me trade) because I can buy ETH then swap that on some shady foreign exchange for what I actually want. Nothing illegal going on there as far as I'm aware, but unless they send in thugs to cut my internet connection there isn't a lot the government can do to control my actions without spending serious money on actually sending people to make me do things I don't want to. It is a nice change of pace from most assets.

Eventually there someone is going to figure out zero-knowledge proofs enough that the tax office can't prove who owns anything or if a capital gain was made. That is going to be an extremely interesting development.

No, they would not need to cut anything off. They'll just need to penalise the usage. They could literally just execute you for the usage.

And, notably, crypto makes it easy to do this years after-the-fact by examining the public ledger. At least if you buy contraband with cash someone would need to compromise the seller or surveil the transaction in real-time to catch you. If you're transacting crypto in a state where transacting crypto is illegal, you're one op-sec failure away from your wallet being linked to your true identity and revealing all past transactions.

Despotism cares little for economic feasibility

At some people they will have to. They have a lot of resources, but not infinite. If cracking down becomes exponentially harder due to network effects and technical reasons, they simply can't go that way.

The problem is not the technology. If you want to use crypto for normal daily stuff you need to spread it among poeple. And the more you spread it among people, the more people will want to regulate it(normal people, users). Because they will not want to lose money or get caught in some stupid crypto schemes

I think education is the key here. Scams will always be there just as they are with fiat money. Crypto makes it easier for scammers, sure, but regulation can only make it a bit harder.

The only way to stop getting caught in schemes is to be educated about how crypto and economics work in the first place.

I'm not talking about EVM-bytecode level or keccak256 implementations of course, but a general understanding of what is what.

How do you want to educate people about crypto if it's still very hard to educate them about normal money?

Crypto is not going to work in the sense the original authors envisioned it. It is trying to solve social problems with very poor technology. Social problems you want to be solving differently to be successful

how do you regulate crypto in the corrupted country with corrupted govt? How people want to regulate it this way in a such country?

Your example makes sense in countries like Canada ( till 2021 ). Who knows when US or Germany or other west country will start to play against their citizens like in Canada?

I think probably faster than later because it goes into comunist like states direction where country want to run every citizen life ... like it happened in Poland after II-WW

Monero already exists. Why hasn’t it won?

Because it has 0 exposure in the oversaturated market.

Then how would a different privacy-preserving coin get adopted? If all it takes for a privacy-preserving coin to fail is other coins in the market, then I don't think it is naive to consider the possibility that "blockchain technology wouldn't become more privacy-friendly to the extent that governments trying to have power over it practically need to give up".

Governments can do this: https://xkcd.com/538/

> practically need to give up because it simply would become economically infeasible for them to do that.

Wars are economically unfeasible. Didn't stop governments from waging them.

War can be extremely profitable.

All cryptography is vulnerable to a technique canonically called "rubber hose cryptography," which is where you beat someone with a rubber hose until they give you the key. It's so effective it can even break post-quantum algorithms without a quantum computer!

Governments have plenty of rubber hoses, and guns.

The idea that non-technical people with no infosec / netsec / tradecraft knowledge could use any form of crypto within a regime that banned it aggressively without placing themselves in massive jeopardy is the height of looney tunes techno-utopianism. Keep in mind that these are usually nations that lack little things like habeas corpus, due process of law, or in some cases any rule of law whatsoever. If the government doesn't like what you are doing they disappear or kill you.

Sure but you must be very wary that this all may be temporary.

Your government may decide to crack down on crypto, making it difficult to convert to your local currency (as many countries do with USD).

The crypto world in the US may very well be a bubble that will burst at some point.

Sure, it might be temporary, but it makes government's job much more difficult as opposed to traditional centralized systems.

And as web3 progresses, the line between the Internet and cryptocurrencies will blur even more, making it hard to define laws around crypto without banning access to the Internet in the first place, which will make their job even harder, which is good in terms of taking power back from authoritarian goverments.

The whole financial sector in the U.S. is a bubble that will burst at some point. Have already lived through one of those just 14 years ago. And now we're getting elevated inflation, multiple international currencies experiencing hyperinflation, etc.

Crypto is at least transparent and fully auditable. Loans stay solvent as they are over collateralized and automatically liquidated when they become close to under collateralization. As a result, the crypto space has and will go through many mini bubbles that resolve themselves very quickly.

Crypto and blockchain are fundamentally transformative technologies. The U.S. government will make moves to co-opt it, via stable coin regulation, but they won't be able to fully control the space. It is truly international in scope, and runs on math and cryptography. They can scarcely ban seed phrases, or blockchain in general, as it is fundamentally a form of speech.

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