Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcbrand | Hacker News Reader

Similarly, most public blockchain-based financial products are a disaster for financial privacy; the exceptions are a handful of emerging privacy-focused blockchain finance alternatives, and these are a gift to money-launderers.

Damned if you do and damned if you don't.

The existing, centralized electronic payment systems are a disaster for financial privacy, and it'll only get worse with CBDCs.

If you try to make something private, then you're helping money launderers, criminals and pedophiles.

Therefore, the message from the incumbents:

Shut up and embrace the unfolding panopticon, otherwise you're a bad person.

Also, we reserve the right to dictate what you spend your money on and if you want to donate to causes (e.g. Wikileaks or truckers) that we don't approve of, we'll block your bank account and cut you off from the system.

Lastly, we reserve the right to manipulate the money supply. It's enough for you to know that we are experts and have your best interests in mind. You don't need to concern yourself with how much money there is, how its supply is managed or the potential negative effects of our manipulation, you wouldn't understand the implications anyway.

View on HN

>Damned if you do and damned if you don't.

Surely there is a middle ground between "every single transaction that has ever occurred in the history of the blockchain is public and visible to all" and "no transactions are ever visible to anyone including governments investigating crimes that have exercised due process in obtaining warrants and subpoenas".

That's the status quo. A handful of entrenched banks consume all the data and share with state officials when asked (and increasingly advertisers). In return, every 10 years or so, there is a big bank bailout. If they get in trouble trillions in newly created dollars are used to buy assets the banks hold on their balance sheet to avoid a panic.

Unfortunately this is a problem of electronic money. Physical money is hard to track in small quantities, but as the quantities get larger it becomes more obvious and harder to hide the suitcases full of cash. (Or, in the Iraq invasion, C130s full of cash: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1 )

Electronic money of whatever form is equally trackable regardless of the value of the transaction. That forces a world where either you can drop country-destabilising quantities of money anywhere without any law enforcement or every microtransaction ends up in the security services database.

Anonymous billions are all fun and games until the second plane hits the tower.

> Anonymous billions are all fun and games until the second plane hits the tower.

What? security services can only spy on money, but just can’t do their main job of preventing attacks by humans?

Maybe we should hire a competent replacement for that job then.

Yes, and that middle ground is the public blockchain. The transactions are visible but the identities of the endpoints are not. That leaves discovery of those identities up to the investigatory bodies following due process, whether through forensic blockchain or other methods. The blockchain is public but anonymous.

>If you try to make something private, then you're helping money launderers, criminals and pedophiles.

But you can't just hand wave concerns regarding money laundering and other criminality away. If you want to, you should just say "these things don't matter that much", but don't just avoid them entirely.

>Lastly, we reserve the right to manipulate the money supply. It's enough for you to know that we are experts and have your best interests in mind. You don't need to concern yourself with how much money there is, how its supply is managed or the potential negative effects of our manipulation, you wouldn't understand the implications anyway.

You mean to say that we live in a democracy. We elect our representatives, and they pick who runs these institutions. They are relatively "undemocratic" because when politicians are able to manipulate the interest rates directly, well things are perhaps even worse.

But you can't just hand wave concerns regarding money laundering and other criminality away.

I'm not, I'm pointing out the rhetorical techniques being used to delegitimize people who try to create privacy tools.

You mean to say that we live in a democracy. We elect our representatives, and they pick who runs these institutions.

It's a pernicious myth that there is some meaningful democratic oversight over monetary policy. Central banks are privately owned and/or structured in such a way as to not be beholden to political pressure (for the somewhat justifiable reason that politicians are even worse at managing monetary policy).

> It's a pernicious myth that there is some meaningful democratic oversight over monetary policy

Latinate words are not a useful cover when you're lying. All Western central banks are effectively a branch of government and are directly responsible to Congress/euparl/$local_variant, and are run by a bunch of politicians (the chair of the Fed is Powell and the president of the ECB is Lagarde, ffs).

The notion that they aren't beholden to the popular will is just ridicolous.

The second paragraph on Wikipedia:

Central banks in most developed nations are institutionally independent from political interference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank

You used 'privately owned' to indicate it being shady.

The paper linked in the Wikipedia citation for that line has the following in its abstract:

"The governance of central banks has two dimensions: corporate governance and public governance. Public governance is an institutional framework whereby the general public governs a central bank by and through the legislative and executive bodies in a country (...)".

"Independence of the central bank" means independence from direct intrusion by the executive branch, in the same sense the judiciary is independent from political interference.

So, generally, are courts, police and civil servants.

That doesn’t mean that those are not government institutions.

>money launderers, criminals and pedophiles.

I think it's important to expand on the above because the above terms are tame. They give an impression of individual small time criminals.

It's North Korea, Russia, dictators and despots across the world, the cartels, organized criminals. Large scale Tax avoiders, human traffickers, drug traffickers, weapon smugglers. It's the organized big money criminals, both high and low class that fund the worst aspects of humanity.

Funnily enough, the people who live under dictators, despots, cartels and organized criminals often more easily realise the benefits of money that cannot be censored, cannot have its issuance be manipulated, is permissionless and very difficult to confiscate.

(Talking about Bitcoin here. Not all crypto applies)

Which examples? The ones who take hush money and are subject to increased violence from an increasingly powerful cartel?

The ones who are paying for these open ponzi schemes by having their electricity stolen by the state?

How about El Salvador, or Argentina, or Nigeria where the poorest lost significant chunks of their capital from btc crash to terra/luna collapse.

Uhuh... and if the state, with its monopoly on violence, wishes to ban these currencies?

D'you think an "ordinary person" is going to risk being thrown in a gulag?

The problem with all these tech utopians is they think the relevant problems are technical: we've solved trust! (Between machines negotiating over a network). We've solved currency manipulation (oh its not a currency, it's an asset; and oh it can be manipulated by the 3 people who own 50% of it).

All the problems are social, not technological. And crypto makes all of them worse! By an order of magnitude worse.

Uhuh... and if the state, with its monopoly on violence, wishes to ban these currencies?

They can try, but it's very difficult to do. I hear we'll win the war on drugs any day now.

All the problems are social, not technological

No solution is 100% social or technological, you need both. The existence of cryptocurrencies doesn't remove the need for social coordination.

Right, but you realise that a system in which the handful of early-stakers have all of the power; and in which no change or revision is possible; and in which blackmail & abuse of key-holders is necessitated to obtain their funds; and in which there is no economy of the currency to provide a grounding in value; and in which therefore it is the late-stakers who provide liquidiy to the early feudal lords... and in which ...

Is a worse situation, right?

Crypto is just fedualism with land=coin. Really. That's what it is.

It's about as anti-freedom as one can imagine. It's "freedom in form" and not in content. It's the freedom of the colonizer on new land, and the oppression of all else who live there. A necessary oppression, not open to revision, and executed by machine.

The issuance of Bitcoin is about as fair as one could hope for, for a non-state currency.

Satoshi advertised the currency and the start of mining beforehand, to give other people a chance to participate. There was no pre-mine.

In the early days there were faucets that handed out bitcoins for free.

Due to the boom and bust cycle of Bitcoin, many of the early holders cashed out instead of holding all the way to untold wealth. This is actually a nice side-effect of the early stages of Bitcoin adoption.

Very early holders of Bitcoin had to take the risk that the currency was somehow flawed and would go to zero, in some sense, the gains they made are a function of the risk they took.

The solution to wealth inequality is not to force everything to be equal, it's to allow both upward and downward mobility. The wealthy must be allowed to fail and not be bailed out.

Interestingly, bailouts are a common feature of the fiat monetary system.

I believe it's estimated c. 10 individuals own c. 50% of Ethereum.

A deflationary asset, like land for example, is not a good currency. As a powerbase, it's called feudalism. And that's not a good politics.

Power in crypto is radically centralised to the owners, not the users (unlike democracies).

One has to imagine people like you know this, or feel it, in the lust for the value increases to your own stake: that is, a lust that you are the one in control. Either way, you're playing the role of a daemon here, whether you realise it or not.

And the devil you are putting on the thrown are a handful of billionaires with power and control executed by a machine.

Thankfully bitcoin has no army, and all of this will fade into the obvious malicious stupidity it already is.

I believe it's estimated c. 10 individuals own c. 50% of Ethereum.

I wrote about Bitcoin, not Ethereum. There are lots of Bitcoiners that think Ethereum is a scam due to the large premine and larping as a decentralized project.

Either way, you're playing the role of a daemon here, whether you realise it or not.

And the devil you are putting on the thrown are a handful of billionaires with power and control executed by a machine.

The fact that you have to start using flowery religious language of condemnation appears to me an indication that you're running out of logical arguments.

Thankfully bitcoin has no army

That's one of its features, which proponents value.

The point is that that "ordinary person" is already at risk of the gulag, and would like to reduce that risk by hiding information.

> Uhuh... and if the state, with its monopoly on violence, wishes to ban these currencies?

Then some people comply and some don't

Moreso ordinary people using fully traceable digital money in these situations is a special kind of stupid

> But you can't just hand wave concerns regarding money laundering and other criminality away. If you want to, you should just say "these things don't matter that much", but don't just avoid them entirely.

Actually you can. The war on "money laundering" is a total failure. Those laws costs billions of dollars in compliance, stifle competition, harm innocent people by excluding them from the financial system (estimated 1.7 billion worldwide) and don't actually stop criminals. There's a serious case to be made for putting an end to that war and diverting those resources to old school crime fighting.

https://www.cato.org/blog/money-laundering-laws-ineffective-...

Trustworthy source you have: "The Cato Institute is a public policy research organization—or think tank—that creates a presence for and promotes libertarian ideas in policy debates."

I'm totally against money laundering. It takes the money away from us people for streets, school and healthy care.

And crypto is not providing any solution to this at all. So why not fixing that issue inside the crypto bro fan club first and than trying to replace our current fiat with it?

Alternative source: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1...

> I'm totally against money laundering. It takes the money away from us people for streets, school and healthy care.

I think you're confusing money laundering and tax evasion.

In the UK, spending by financial services firms on AML compliance [1] exceeds all police spending [2] (£28.7 Bn vs £21.47Bn).

This represents a massive misallocation of resources. Public safety would almost certainly be improved if we doubled police spending by slashing AML burdens by 2/3rds.

Unfortunately it's hard for politicians address crime by raising taxes to fund real police but easy for them to attempt to address crime by increasing AML regulation, even if the latter is barely effective.

[1] https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/resource/cutting-the-costs-o... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/298637/united-kingdom-uk...

> Lastly, we reserve the right to manipulate the money supply.

You may dislike the way central banks control and manipulate the money supply, but the reality is that an unmanaged currency is generally a disaster for everyone. To fulfill its role as a stable store of value, a currency has to be managed. The notion that an inherently deflationary unit of accounting (such as Bitcoin), or a completely unmanaged one, or one subject to "management" only through crowd action (as in true Defi) can achieve this is delusional.

> To fulfill its role as a stable store of value, a currency has to be managed.

But they don’t optimize for “stable store of value” over “full employment” or “hidden taxation through monetary inflation”.

In fact, they have the opposite goal because “the velocity of money” is negatively influenced by people using money as a store of value. Keeping money in a savings account and collecting interest is bad for society because reasons.

Managing to a limited inflation that is close to the actual growth in the economy supporting a fiat currency, is managing the currency so that it represents a stable store of value. Managing for full employment is probably a cofactor in stability, although a less direct corollary than managing inflation.

The hard money standard (e.g. precious metals) is older and has outlived nearly all fiat currencies and will likely outlive the existing currencies.

What do you think will be worth more in 100 years from now? 1 US dollar or the equivalent of gold? How about 500 years? 1000 years? My money is on the gold.

Every fiat will be stable until it blows up. It will necessarily be mismanaged in a long enough time line, and based on history it really isn't that long.

I really don't get this line of thought. There's nothing "special" about precious metals in this regard and they only have value as long as people agree they have value. If we found an asteroid rich in gold and managed to capture it, would gold still hold its value? How is gold different than other rare earth metals with a (currently) limited exploitable supply like neodymium?

The only limits on the gold supply are technological ones. If one takes an optimistic view of the future where we become a space-faring species the future supply of gold is effectively unlimited.

Edit: As much as I'm a huge crypto detractor, at least Bitcoin's supply is limited mathematically, not just circumstantially. I would argue this is a bad thing, but if you're looking for something that will hold its value due to scarcity a durable commodity we dig out of the ground seems like a bad long-term bet. What if we discover a massive gold deposit?

> The only limits on the gold supply are technological ones

Right, there's nothing special about it besides the technical limitations. But what's the alternative? With fiat you still have those technical limitations (someone could create indistinguishable counterfeit money and dump it on the market). But there's also the political risk. Someone can get power at the Fed and decide to double the money supply over night. In fact, this has happened time and time again with many fiat currencies so its not exactly an unfounded risk. That's why the precious metal standard is lower risk for arbitrary manipulation

> With fiat you still have those technical limitations (someone could create indistinguishable counterfeit money and dump it on the market).

I think there is more than technological limitations to making this happen. Not only is counterfeiting considered a major crime by the state (who has a monopoly on violence), but the amount of "money" in circulation that has a physical representation is dwarfed by "money" that does not. Even if you doubled the physical currency in circulation you'd only increase the "monetary supply" by 10% or so. Plus there are huge logistics issues with moving that much weight/volume without getting caught.

> Someone can get power at the Fed and decide to double the money supply over night.

I think that if the function of government breaks down to this extent, I will have bigger problems than currency devaluation.

> I think that if the function of government breaks down to this extent, I will have bigger problems than currency devaluation.

I don't know how to tell you this but...

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL

Currencies are not for hodling. You're supposed to spend them in the same year you get them, not compare their values to assets after 100 years. Their job is not to appreciate but to facilitate efficient commerce in civil societies.

Not sure why I should care what Gold, or anything, will be worth in 100 years, let alone 500 years. Economies turn over money supplies on time scales of a year or two, not centuries. Individuals and business need stability over planning cycles that run from years to a few decades at most.

And it's not like precious metal based currencies were stable over long periods anyway. There is nothing in the working of economies that guarantees that precious metals will accumulate in sync with economic growth and contraction. Trying to tie one to the other is every bit as much "fiat" economics as an untethered currency, like the dollar.

I recall looking into plans from the 1970s to peg all central bank currencies into a 'basket of currencies' to avoid things like currency collapse. It would require international goodwill and cooperation, and would eliminate a lot of currency speculation games, so it was kiboshed. Basically it was a mechanism to eliminate volatility and to stabilize the global monetary system. Maybe someone else knows more about it.

This was called Bancor and was proposed by John Maynard Keynes at Breton Woods. It was the major idea competing against the US pushing the dollar as the core of the monetary system and the US had all of the power at the time so that's why we're stuck with the USD now. It's actually a pretty interesting story and Planet Money covered it.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancor

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/526051566

So you also believe that a crypto system is inherently better than what we have?

Just because you believe money is printed as much as the dark secret super elite group wants it be printed?

Ah yes the sseg.

But yes we are still living in a democracy (a lot on hn at least) and the solution to all of these problems definitely are not getting solved by crypto.

You as an avg joe you are much better off with our current fiat system. The money they collect is used for a lot of things you depend on.

You might be totally ignorant to this but just switching to crypto doesn't solve a single problem.

Who says we all want to switch to crypto? Maybe we want the freedom to divide our personal savings any way we see fit.

Democracy is a nice value, but so are freedom and human rights. I expect to have the right to buy crypto or not.

I don't say that.

I only argue about wrong crypto bro arguments.

Feel free to invest in whatever you want but in these discussions cryptobros argue from crypto is the future and is better than fiat.

Be aware though about the energy consumption of BTC. The GPU shortage and Asics garbage it creates.

I would have loved to buy an rtx GPU over people gambling on the side.

“Trust a democratically elected government to act in the interests of its citizens” isn’t ideal, but I’m not sure “trust a combination of tech-bros and anarchy” is an improvement?

I’m working in a legal-but-taboo industry, where mastercard and visa don’t want to deal with us, which is a huge pain in the ass - but every time I’ve looked at crypto, it seems to fix one or two problems and introduce 10 more...

It's an improvement in the sense that it gives you an additional option.

You're making a mistake in thinking that monetary policy is somehow democratic and that there is some kind of meaningful oversight over it.

Central Banks are privately owned and by design are meant to be "independent" of politics (otherwise politicians would use the money printer to continuously to buy votes, destroying the currency in the process).

There is no real oversight over central banks and nobody (outside of the peanut gallery) has meaningfully questioned the extreme central bank policies of the last 10 years or asked the central bankers any uncomfortable questions.

Beyond the Fed, which other large central banks are privately owned?

The Bank of England has only been independent for a pretty short time, for example, so central bank independence is a fairly new concept that could change again - because it is a political decision, not a law of nature.

US, Japan, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Greece, Turkey and South Africa. The Danish one is "self-owned" whatever that means.

The US fed is by far the most important Central Bank due to dollar being the global reserve currency.

Source: https://www.quora.com/Is-the-European-Central-Bank-privately...

EDIT: The ECB is owned by member-states's banks, some of which are privately owned.

In any case, private ownership is only one issue, the other is that central banks are designed to have very little oversight.

Saying that "we can change the laws" doesn't change that. It's not always easy or possible to change laws. When is the USA going to repeal the 2nd amendment?

So, outside of the Fed, there are maybe two more that have some relevance that are privately owned (Japan, Switzerland). The second most important one (ECB) is not.

And, of course, the ownership of the Fed (or the ECB) could be changed by changing laws (the Bank of England is an example here of how central banks might enjoy changing degrees of freedom).

Addendum: to say that it is not easy to change the law is ok, maybe it should not be. But to use some technology to get around laws where there is not enough social capital for change is a very tricky position. If that holds for law X, why not law Y? What if there is never enough social capital for change? Would it then imply a break-up of that society into multiple ones?

> Damned if you do and damned if you don't.

Conventional banking combines a moderate level of privacy with effective measures against money laundering. Why shouldn't we ask that crypto be judged against this baseline?

It's not clear that AML regulation actually is all that effective. It also makes it a lot harder for competitors to start in the banking and finance industry.

"Based on 2009 data, the UN, with US State Department assistance, calculated the global success rate of money laundering controls at just 0.2 percent (UNODC 2011, 14, 119, 131), but, as noted above, the confiscation rate might be 0.07 percent. In other words, despite ubiquitous money laundering controls, criminals retain up to 99.93 percent of criminal proceeds."

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1...

> Conventional banking combines a moderate level of privacy

Rather fake than moderate, I would say.

https://moguldom.com/351338/fact-check-do-jp-morgan-chase-we...

As long as banks can just pretend to protect my privacy, while they sell my data, I feel more comfortable about the type of privacy that cryptos like monero provide.

> Why shouldn't we ask that crypto be judged against this baseline?

Why shouldn't we ask for a reasonable baseline that really protects people's privacy and not just some corporate version of "privacy™"?

> effective measures against money laundering

Just yesterday, Deutsche Bank's HQ was searched over possible money laundering.

I'd still argue that if you want a society with different rules then there are two broad choices:

(i) get enough people on your side to change the society you are in; or

(ii) move to a society that operates closer to what you want

Technological escape hatches are probably at best a stop-gap measure, but not a replacement for (i) or (ii)

Usually yes, but some technologies are so powerful they do reshape what is possible for society. Things like birth control, the internet, military technologies like cavalry or guns, the development of limited liability corporations. These things are more powerful than mere laws in what they accomplished.

Privacy-coins could be the next big one. It switches accounting from being a tool of coercion (c.f. the famous case of the Canadian truckers) to something like air which just cannot practically be denied.

If politicians banded together and behaved like civilised adults then crypto would be worthless. But they aren't about to try that sort of radical change, so this tech might actually solve a lot of problems. With something like Monero I really do not see, at any level, how they could stop me doing stuff like donating to political causes I agree with. That is scary in some ways, but there is also reason to be optimistic.

> the development of limited liability corporations

I generally agree with you but don't understand this example: the concept of an LLC is not a technology that stands against law in a way that forces the law to adapt but is a construct that only exists by the grace of law... like, what would it mean to illegally form an LLC in a world that didn't agree with such actions?

Ah yes, sorry. I may have left out a few steps in the thinking.

A country that doesn't adopt LLCs or some similar method of pooling risk will tend to get overrun by a country that does. So people can try to stand against the tide by not allowing pooled risk and capitalism, then 50-100 years later the capitalists role over them because the wealth gap has gotten so large there isn't room for meaningful resistance.

Kind of like what happened between the USSR and the US, or Europe v. All Other Civilisations. You can technically choose not to use the legal ideas, but that is really just choosing to be overwhelmed by more organised groups of people. Much like how a military that refused to use guns would get overwhelmed by one that does.

I'd would say none of the technologies listed even closely approach the impact of social technologies such as rule of law, democracy, etc.

If your fellow citizens in aggregate really don't like what you do and want to stop you, the will eventually find a way. You want a society that does not police where money flows - which is a big change and there is no evidence that broadly people like to open the taps on things like terrorist financing, slave trading etc. So there will likely be some limits that societies like to enforce.

And of course they could attack crypto by taking over mining, policing any sale of hardware, making touching any crypto a felony, clamp down harder on any cause you want to donate to, etc. They might not win completely, but they might make things pretty uncomfortable for most that would want to use it.

Nobody likes homelessness. How is democracy going at putting an end to it? The list of similar examples is endless; democracies are forced to put up with a lot of stuff that nobody likes when everything that is tried turns out not to work.

Democracy is a very powerful technology, no argument there. But it can't overcome technical realities. It is better at adjusting to them and giving up when the cost gets too high.

Nobody likes homelessness, but do people care about it enough to vote for people with an agenda for it or pay for it to change?

And no, technologies do not freely diffuse through societies, some stuff remains pretty firmly in highly policed boxes when the cost of letting it run free is deemed to high (can you just go buy nuclear weapons, for example?). Who is to say that the cost of banning crypto would be too high - I have not seen the evidence for that (also not really for a ban, either)? That is a political decision, not a technical one. And, yes, there can be bad decisions with really high costs, no doubt.

> ...do people care about it enough to vote for people with an agenda for it...

Yep. Happens regularly.

> ...or pay for it to change?

And nope, certainly not. But crypto will fall into the same category - stamping out the ability to do the - rather simple - necessary maths would require horrific compromises that are simply not supportable. This technology has radically altered the power balance of moving funds around. Sure that isn't sunshine and roses, but at least we don't have to worry about so much about asset freezes.

I don't think asset freezes are high on most people's agenda in first world countries. And the developing world does not have the GDP to move how things are done in the large economies for now.

Sure it is. Every so often the government rolls in and reallocates wealth to the wealthy - eg, as happened in '08 and is famously memorialised in the Bitcoin genesis block. Dealing with asset shenanigans like freezes is exactly why the crypto project started. If you've got no assets then sure, ignore that. Otherwise it makes sense to start tallying the risks against government seizures.

Plus asset freezes are on the cards for shutting down protesting truckers. If we're living in a world where the Canadian government can attack truckers (of all people) with asset freezes why can't it happen to you or me? I don't see the much difference between myself and a Canadian trucker. I suppose I couldn't handle working hard for more than about 6 hours at a time.

Do you have any data backing up that asset freezes are high on most people's agenda? Where I live certainly it is not, doesn't even show up in any surveys etc. and the asset freezes at Canadian truckers are/were not really much of a news item (living in large European country). I can see that trust in banks has eroded a bit (still surprisingly high) but asset freezes or seizures are not a thing in the public eye where I live.

I can believe that for some people the topic is high on the agenda, but really "most"?

I think every time the subject comes up we find that people (not themselves homeless) do like homelessness, and regard it as a suitable punishment for failing to contribute to society, being mentally ill, or using hard drugs.

> how they could stop me doing stuff like donating to political causes I agree with

Like I said upthread, this lasts until the second plane strikes the tower.

The invasion of Ukraine by Russia brought a huge, unprecedented wave of financial sanctions. If cryptocurrency actually worked for private, uncensorable transactions, they would have shrugged this off and moved to Monero. Perhaps we shouldn't rule this out. But remember the level of law changes to privacy and surveillance rolled out after 9/11 as well. We've not yet seen the first terrorist attack that would not have been possible without uncensorable cryptocurrency funding; the response to that will be something to behold.

> move to a society that operates closer to what you want

This doesn't work. All countries are pressured to adopt the same compliance and framework. OECD, IMF, WEF, and other world organizations will successfully force same reforms everywhere.

What is your evidence that in aggregate citizens want what you want/dislike the current state? If that is not the case, you cannot claim that "countries are pressured".

That has nothing to do with whether countries are pressured or not. The fact is, the standards from those groups are huge pressure on countries to conform.

They offer money, but with strings attached. Either the country conforms or it doesn’t get the money.

But do the citizens of those countries using those rules mostly object to those rules? Do Germans or Italians want different anti-money laundering standards, for example?

> Do Germans or Italians want different anti-money laundering standards, for example?

Yes. Germany is the highest user of cash in G-7 and has radically different views on privacy from other G-7/G-20 country, doesn't even have a centralized citizen register.

They have very little in common with Italy on many aspects, and certainly standards would vary as well.

But what does it matter? You think supra-national organizations actually care what some little people think?

Show me the survey on AML, please.

Edit: German citizens are all properly in registers, more local, but very registered nonetheless. You need to have government ID by law. Plus there is a national tax ID.

Do tell: how do you think these standards are established? By performing surveys or some other democratic/rule of law/other ritual?

FATF is an unelected, undemocratic body, where you have absolute monarchies like Saudi Arabia and authoritarian states like Russia audit the free/democratic/morebuzzwords West.

I can only imagine you think voting matters too.

It doesn’t, never did.

It's undeniable that countries are pressured. Look at El Salvador and the unrelenting salvo of bad press they get over starting to accept Bitcoin as legal tender.

The IMF immediately told them that they would no longer be elligible for any IMF loans or financial transactions until they sold all Bitcoin they owned and rolled back the Bitcoin legislation. And the kicker, El Salvador bought and held XX million dollars worth of Bitcoin (last I checked), while their GDP was XX,XXX million dollars, and the loans that they roll were for X,XXX dollars.

There aren't many other players at nation state level like the IMF... so they can exert a lot of pressure on monetary policy. If you want another example, look at how the IMF dealt with Greece.

Yes, organizations do (and should exert) pressure when they give something, but is it done against the will of the citizens (i.e., government agreeing to things the citizens don't want. A vocal opposition is not enough to claim that)? A country is free to isolate itself etc. if the people there are happy with it.

can you find people in Cyprus that were enthusiastic about losing money so that the government can pay bankers' gambling debts?

a 2-3 verified examples will suffice, tia.

Depends what the alternative would have been... lose all deposits?

You are not aware at all how Cyprus went down, are you?

The banking holiday was declared in Cyprus, banks and ATMs shutodnw, everyone local is locked out completely, meanwhile deposits were drained by the rich international depositors thru oversease branches that remained open.

Why do you love defending the indefensible so much? Take the L and move on.

How would you know what I know about what happened in Cyprus?

Was what happened the best possible result - probably not. But I would say that goes for all European responses to the financial crisis then - but that is not the same as being totally indefensible. The question has to be: what outcome could we have now that would be better and what should we have done then and could that have been done? And with Cyprus one issue is the smallness of the economy, which meant what a US might be able to do might not be possible for them on their own.

EDIT: and one of the issues in Europe certainly seems to be that broad, untailored measures are not very popular even though ex-post they appear to perform better - so popular opinion does matter

Do you think Germany should use more cash or less?

I can imagine that only a tiny minority of citizens was fine with it when Cyprus' government closed the banks in 2013 for a couple of days and took some additional percents of already taxed balances.

Who really would be fine with giving the government 10% of their money, so they can pay their gambling debts?

Or (iii) try to set up a new society elsewhere, e.g. Cryptoland[0], the Crypto-Currency Seastead[1], Blockchain City[2], Bitcoin city[3], etc.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29867057

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28441794

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29099022

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29300250

“Setting up a new society elsewhere with our own currency” is the very definition of the US

There are some things that are plain illegal. If you’re laundering money, selling illegal drugs, running guns, funding terrorist groups, etc you run the risk of getting caught and having your accounts shut down.

We’re not living in a dictatorship (yet). There’s still due process and the justice system.

Lastly, we reserve the right to manipulate the money supply.

“In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.” — Ezra Pound

If you’re interested in how money works you should read a book or two about it. It’s pretty interesting. “The government,” isn’t “printing money.”

Absolutely concern yourself with it.

The problem right now is that government regulators aren’t technically savvy enough to understand cryptocrap and it’s implications. They read what briefs they can but they face endless technobabble from lobbyists and “industry representatives.” The hearings with the US congress were something else.

We’re not living in a dictatorship (yet).

Funny how people here assume we all live in the same country. There are lots of people on HN who live in dictatorships.

If you’re interested in how money works you should read a book or two about it. It’s pretty interesting.

Thanks for the condescension. Money printing is a colloquial term used to describe various ways in which the money supply is manipulated by Central Banks, they like to use terms such as Quantitative Easing (creation of new bank reserves that didn't before exist) and open market operations (buying assets with money that didn't before exist).

The article is about Washington....

> The government,” isn’t “printing money.”

It's certainly increasing the maximum potential supply in ways divorced from any market mechanism. They are central planners and they're failing hard like central planners did before.

You bet I think those people act with my interests in mind, since I elected the people who appointed them (unlike random scammers in croin space).

The panopticon you refer to is called "human society", by the way. You cannot participate in one and maintain unlimited freedom. If you are an evil jerk who kidnaps my child or steals life savings from my mom I want to be sure your assets can be seized. If you want to build anarchy, go ahead somewhere else but I think you'll find yourself tired of it rather quickly (and likely get eaten by ruthless command economies).

> You bet I think those people act with my interests in mind, since I elected the people who appointed them (unlike random scammers in croin space).

I want to live in this wonderland too, where are you?

If you don't think the system works, fix it. It is actually possible in a democracy, thankfully. Techno solutions do not solve the underlying human factor problems.

> If you don't think the system works, fix it

Hence Bitcoin.

Reply that next time I ask "make up an entirely new system with the same human factor problems but now rogue actors acting with impunity, no oversight and fewer avenues to democratically influence them" rather than "fix it"

If you live in a democratic country, you actually have ways of fixing it. And no, you don't need to give up your freedom for blockchain panopticon in the process.

>If you live in a democratic country, you actually have ways of fixing it

You still haven't told me in what fantasy land you live where that is actually possible.

Are you living in China or something? Sorry if so. I meant a country with a democratically elected government.

No, I live in a democratic country, where politicians make empty promises and either accomplish nothing or just line up their pockets. Like most democratic countries.

I know that's cynical, but welcome to reality.

I have long been disillusioned by the fact that people can have an impact on their society by simply electing someone that will totally be fixing the issues that have been plaguing society for decades, for real this time, pinky swear.

But hey, again, if you live somewhere that actually happens let me know and I'll board the next rocket.

It's not magic, it takes time but crucially this is not like authoritative regimes that censor all media, you have access to information and you can vote.

If there is no one suitable to vote for, maybe you can be that guy. And on flip side, if you think no one will vote for you, maybe your opinion is not aligned with the majority in your country.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com