Comment by yellowapple | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yellowapple | Hacker News Reader

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> What is a "good outcome?" A good outcome for whom? A great outcome for most species, and most h.sapiens, would be an outright ban, because of the risk spread.

This only logically follows if literally all cryptocurrencies are proof-of-work (let alone proof-of-work using a hashing algorithm as energy-intensive as SHA256). This is patently false, and therefore the assertion that an outright ban on the very concept of a cryptocurrency is somehow a net benefit to global society requires more of a supporting argument than "Bitcoin exists and is currently dominant". By your metric, banning only proof-of-work cryptocurrencies would be more than sufficient, assuming that such a ban could be enforced...

> Powerful nations might, say, weave a crypto-ban requirement into multilateral trade agreements, like we already do for intellectual property.

Right, and that totally eliminated (or hell, at least even significantly curtailed) copyright infringement in those jurisdictions, right? If you sincerely believe that, then I've got an NFT of Ecuador to sell you.

The cat's out of Pandora's box. You can't "uninvent" peer-to-peer networking, and you can't "uninvent" decentralized ledgers. Nation-states can impose whatever bans they want; unless they're willing to pull a PRC or DPRK and start committing rampant privacy violations for censorship reasons, those bans are toothless.

> This only logically follows if literally all cryptocurrencies are proof-of-work (let alone proof-of-work using a hashing algorithm as energy-intensive as SHA256). This is patently false

Against this, I argue:

- easier/cheaper hashing actually doesn't work -- the yield curve in bitcoin mining is there for a reason, and without it, I doubt PoW would fly.

> ...and therefore the assertion that an outright ban on the very concept of a cryptocurrency is somehow a net benefit to global society requires more of a supporting argument than "Bitcoin exists and is currently dominant".

Bitcoin is an investment, because it's terrible for small, frequent transactions. (Both in UX and eco terms.) Reductio ad absurdum: If it doesn't remain dominant, then it has no use case, as it's a lousy investment instrument. If the above goes throw for bitcoin, then, a fortirori, the same reductio can also apply to any other PoW coin.

And don't get me started on PoS -- it's literally just an MLM you can buy into. A system for centralizing wealth in the hands of whoever already has it.

> Right, and that totally eliminated (or hell, at least even significantly curtailed) copyright infringement in those jurisdictions, right? If you sincerely believe that, then I've got an NFT of Ecuador to sell you.

It did, though? I remember the nineties well -- relatives would go to China and come back with armfuls of factory-pressed CDs and DVDs. Anything you wanted. Clean and new-in-box. That went away because of IP protection baked into trade agreements. And before you say 'BitTorrent', please remember, the analogy is _factory_ piracy -- because, like nineties piracy, Bitcoin requires mining rigs, and these are large, physical assets, like factories, and this is unlikely to change. What happened to IP after Napster is another thing, and does not invalidate the analogy. A similar virtualization/p2p move is unlikely to work for mining. (But I could always be wrong about this -- I'm open to persuasion, if you can paint me a word-picture of what competitive distributed mining would look like, other than NK Monero malware.)

> By your metric, banning only proof-of-work cryptocurrencies would be more than sufficient, assuming that such a ban could be enforced...

It's not hard -- a helicopter and a FLIR cam would work, as well as cooperation from the energy provider. Choke off the supply of mining, and wait for this to in turn cause transactions to become unwieldy.

> The cat's out of Pandora's box.

Shoot it, then.

> You can't "uninvent" peer-to-peer networking, and you can't "uninvent" decentralized ledgers.

Yes, but you can ban the sale of various things. Laws are possible things.

> Nation-states can impose whatever bans they want; unless they're willing to pull a PRC or DPRK and start committing rampant privacy violations for censorship reasons, those bans are toothless.

Expand/explain. I do not understand the point you attempt to make.

> easier/cheaper hashing actually doesn't work -- the yield curve in bitcoin mining is there for a reason, and without it, I doubt PoW would fly.

And yet there are numerous non-SHA256 proof-of-work systems that have worked (pun intended) just fine while having lower energy requirements.

> Reductio ad absurdum: If it doesn't remain dominant, then it has no use case, as it's a lousy investment instrument. If the above goes throw for bitcoin, then, a fortirori, the same reductio can also apply to any other PoW coin.

This presupposes that all PoW coins have the same properties - never mind that pretty much every cryptocurrency created since Bitcoin has had "do it faster and cheaper than Bitcoin" as an implicit if not explicit goal.

> And don't get me started on PoS -- it's literally just an MLM you can buy into.

The people who say this are the same people who know next to nothing about PoS.

> I remember the nineties well -- relatives would go to China and come back with armfuls of factory-pressed CDs and DVDs. Anything you wanted. Clean and new-in-box. That went away because of IP protection baked into trade agreements.

It went away because now you can buy knockoffs on AliExpress instead of relying on relatives in China.

> And before you say 'BitTorrent', please remember, the analogy is _factory_ piracy

Nope. The equivalent to electronic money is electronic piracy. Moving the goalposts does not a good argument make.

> Bitcoin requires mining rigs, and these are large, physical assets, like factories, and this is unlikely to change.

Again: there are other PoW blockchains besides Bitcoin.

Even in Bitcoin's case, hashing ASICs don't have to be large; that's currently the most profitable approach, but mining can and would readily adapt. SHA256 is also a common enough algorithm outside of Bitcoin that hardware accelerators for it have ample non-Bitcoin usecases; you'd have a hard time blanket banning any and all SHA256 hashing unless you're willing to break password authentication for the vast majority of computers in a given jurisdiction, and you'd likewise have a hard time justifying the ban of hardware that makes password hashing faster (even if it just so happens to be capable of mining Bitcoin).

> a helicopter and a FLIR cam would work, as well as cooperation from the energy provider.

And if the farm's off-grid on solar? The energy provider would have zero visibility on that, and the helicopter flying around day in and day out would be far more ecologically destructive.

> Shoot it, then.

Good luck with that.

> Yes, but you can ban the sale of various things.

We're literally talking about a class of electronic currencies which do not give the slightest sliver of a rodent's anus whether there are laws prohibiting a given transaction. That strategy hasn't worked for IP infringement (despite your assertions), it hasn't worked for the drug trade, it didn't work for liquor trade during Prohibition, it's already starting to fail with the firearms trade in gun-restricting countries (thanks, 3D printers and hardware stores!)... there is zero reason to believe it would work for cryptocurrency.

> Expand/explain. I do not understand the point you attempt to make.

What part did you not understand?

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