Hacker News Reader

Comment by snowwrestler | Hacker News Reader

THE big argument in favor of cryptocurrency as a concept was that it freed people to store and transact value without interference or oversight by governments and institutions.

A big argument against cryptocurrency was that those governments and institutions had developed financial oversight for a reason.

View on HN

There’s a weird false equivalence here. Whenever critics hear government oversight and interference, they immediately point to the governments that manage their currency relatively well and say “look, these governments do therefore no one needs to worry”.

History and contemporary geopolitics are both littered with examples of governments that absolutely ruin their population’s lives with currency problems. What if it were possible to have consumer protection regulation and also remove some of the nasty side effects of government and institutional preference in monetary policy?

And this is the idea behind crypto in a nutshell: "Some governments have been financially irresponsible in the past, so we need a tool to allow us to bypass all government regulations."

However, the rest of us have a name for "bypassing government regulations" - we call it "crime".

> What if it were possible to have consumer protection regulation and also remove some of the nasty side effects of government and institutional preference in monetary policy?

"Crime, with extra steps".

> However, the rest of us have a name for "bypassing government regulations" - we call it "crime".

Yeah, like hiding Jews during Holocaust was a capital offense. Pretty dumb argument.

Congratulations! You have managed to both post the same argument they just refuted ("some governments in the past were bad, therefore we need to be able to avoid all governments forever"), and invoke Godwin's Law at the same time!

Pretty impressive, I'd say.

> the same argument they just refuted

They didn't refute the argument. They treated "crime" and "wrong" as an implication, and my Godwin invocation fits well to show it is absurd.

> However, the rest of us have a name for "bypassing government regulations" - we call it "crime".

I don’t think that’s what we call crime. Isn’t crime the direct violation of government regulations?

By your argument, the use of _any_ currency other than your own government’s would be a crime. Or, is the use of every currency a crime in every other country? When I exchange Euros for JPY in the US, have I committed a crime?

As far as I’m aware, there are no laws against the use of cryptocurrency. There are plenty of laws against things like securities fraud and fraud in general, and those are all generally well and good.

> Some governments have been financially irresponsible in the past, so we need a tool to allow us to bypass all government regulations

I think you should probably gain a clearer understanding of how the currency markets have been behaving over the last year. Many currencies have lost >30% of their value against the USD (which might not matter so much if the USD were the same status as the others).

The only cryptocurrency that does that is RAI in a sea of shit.

FTX did not allow people to “store and transact value without interference”. It was an institution which held user funds. All FTX users who transferred the crypto they bought out to their own wallets were unaffected by this scam. It was the people who’s money was held in FTXs traditional bank accounts who were robbed.

It's basically digital cash but a whole hell of lot easier to move around in quantity. Whether that is use for good or ill is orthogonal. There are lots of people who see the direction most (all?) of the governments of the world are leaning in to fascism and control (or at least surveillance) of all areas of our lives because they think we're all children. It was a nice dream I suppose.

in a way crypto claimed you could have faith in "math" while in fact nothing should be trusted blindly, since we didn't write said "math", and regulations are one fairly known way to enforce a higher level of trust

Reply on news.ycombinator.com