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Comment by bettysdiagnose | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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.

> 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...

>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

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