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Comment by azinman2 | Hacker News Reader

I’m curious your motivation. To me this is the easiest way for scams/bad actors to generate a lot of not-good-for-society content.

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And the US Dollar in cash is the easiest way for drug dealers to get payment for the drugs they are pushing on the street. Yet, the answer to that is not to demand that society goes cash-less. Money will always be used by people you disagree with. And you should not try to use the money itself as a way of limiting what people do. For if you do, one day it could be you that finds himself unable to spend his money the way he wants to because someone else, more powerful than you, disagrees with how you spend that money.

Using money that is yours should never be illegal. Prosecute the bad people for the bad thing they did in the first place to get the money / the bad thing that someone paid them money for.

> you should not try to use the money itself as a way of limiting what people do

Are you saying that Anti money laundering rules should be scrapped?

If they don't work, are fully ineffective and generally only catch small fishes I guess we could scrap them.

> Prosecute the bad people for the bad thing they did in the first place

How do you expect to do that, without following the money?

If someone shows up with a suitcase full of money, it's extremely unlikely that they earned this money in a legal way and paid taxes.

Same thing with crypto. Theoretically it's possible that people use it for legal means, in practice 99% of people do not.

It's much easier to follow someone using a public ledger than having to beg/subpoena banks for records with the broken/outdated AML/KYC/KYB system, with bank secrecy in many places, with banks participating in illicit activities too sometimes, etc.

> Theoretically it's possible that people use it for legal means, in practice 99% of people do not.

This is a completely made up statistic and it is showing your bias and/or ignorance about the topic. The lower estimates from industry sources like Chainalysis (0.15-0.62%) contrast sharply with higher academic estimates (23-46%) because the latter tend to include illicit activities that happen off chain but get "washed" on-chain which explains their own huge range of estimation... it is hard to quantify but nobody serious ever came close to 99%.

Something for which there are estimates close to 90% is the volume of transactions happening on centralized exchanges, and since these are required pretty much everywhere to follow AML procedures, just like traditional banks (sometimes even more intrusive than banks), it means it is just as easy, if not easier, to prosecute criminals who would use these... with the added bonus of having a public ledger with records of their activity on-chain.

I suggest to everyone interested to also hear what Brett Johnson, a former criminal, has to say about the topic in his podcast [1].

[1] https://anchor.fm/s/9a92cef4/podcast/play/84999897/https%3A%...

It's either a bad person or MrBeast.

> cash is the easiest way for drug dealers to get payment for the drugs they are pushing on the street. Yet, the answer to that is not to demand that society goes cash-less. That is exactly what many are proposing, or at least a core argument of many anti-cash proponents.

Crypto is not money. Money is coupled to a value; crypto is as much a currency as paintings are: completely arbitrary.

What value is money coupled to?

Government backing, our shared delusion, unicorn dust, take your pick: whatever it is, it's something stable enough that it doesn't experience quintuple digit deflation in a decade.

yes, runaway inflation is much better!

Your tone implies you're unironically trying to compare 3% inflation to 20,000% deflation. That'd be embarrassing.

And you're comparing annualised inflation to the deflation over a decade, which is equally embarrassing. Regardless, all other things being equal anyone who has their own financial interests at heart would rather hold a currency that experienced 20,000% deflation since its creation than one that lost 99% of its value to inflation since its creation. Because the best predictor of future performance is past performance.

Did you just try to browbeat me for not breaking down the deflation over a time period... then compare 10 years of BTC movement to some arbitrary period of USD movement?

Then top it off by claiming someone would want a currency that deflates 20,000%?

there are plenty of places where they chop off a couple of zeros off their currency every few years.

no, no, I love 10% inflation, it's really good for employers, they can charge customers more because of "inflation", and they don't have to pay me any more, because their costs have gone up so much because of... "inflation".

Effectively, human work. Money is an abstraction over the relative value we assign physical goods; instead of bartering, we collectively agree on using money as an intermediate form. The financial system, then, is a lot more abstraction over the value of producers of things—and thereby human work.

Of course it's way more complex than that, but that's the basic difference between real-world money and crypto currencies.

Wrong. For all intent and purposes, you could switch any cryptocurrency with whatever FIAT in your sentence and it still applies. I don't hunt money and wear it as a necklace (lion teeth). I don't mine it out of a gold mine. It is given to me in exchange for work.

Given. Exchange.

If you and I agree that we only accept little tin circles; What's the difference? When you say money, what are you referring to? Just the US bank note? Some brass coins? Any FIAT?

Today's FIAT have nothing to do with what currency, basically just a fancy IOU note, used to be. Currency WAS representative of human work. Directly. The oldest known form are lion teeth. You had to WORK to get them. It was direct proof of work. And it was important to keep that link so no arbitrary value is taken or added to it.

The next major leap of currency was IOU notes. Notes that banks respected between each other. One bank gives you some paper that says "trust me, bro, I'm worth 2 lion teeth". You go to another bank and can exchange that paper back to 2 lion teeth.

At one point in time, the US bamboozled the entire world and declared the US dollar as some form of new gold bar (what it was previously tied to, gold; proof of work). Tying all of FIAT to it. A value that can more easily be arbitrarily changed. And, since then, propaganda reigns supreme and people like you are born. Praising a nonsensical paper as some kind immovable artefact of mankind.

Language evolved. Law evolved. Currency didn't evolve. And, for some reason, you are fighting its evolution.

Don't vote.

This is simply not correct. A fiat currency is ultimately bound to the performance of the global economy, so it sure ties into gold mines or the lion teeth gathered by hunters, I've you're so inclined to keep it savage.

The dollar is fundamentally a promise of the US government that they owe you a given amount of money. As long as the US government exists, a dollar is going to have a worth. You may debate the virtue of the US government all you want, but at the same time, there's nobody to give you any such guarantee for a Bitcoin, or an NFT. The moment the market settles for a new plaything, these binary numbers you praise will be entirely worthless. So when I say money, I'm referring to the trustworthiness of its issuer.

The only thing Crypto has brought us is a gambling system rich people use to get richer, and poor people use to loose money; lots of brainlessly burned electricity; a neat way to collect ransomware payouts; and a bunch of Ponzi schemes.

People like you like to feel smarter than anybody else, and I know you'll stay committed to cryptocurrency regardless of any reason. So I will drop out of this discussion here, as it's fruitless.

I'm not a crypto bro by any means, but I think crypto satisfies those criteria.

If you want to know the actual answer however. The answer is debt. Or more specifically assets and liabilities on various bank ledgers. Those banks organically set the value to monetary systems. This system would fall apart without a forced taxation system for a given currency.

The actual value is debt and taxation. I'm not complaining, who am I to criticize? But that is the answer.

One could conceive of such a crypto ledger system, and that would be a CBDC.

Doesn't that come down to the same thing effectively? Debt and taxation are details of a system of trusted authorities built around the economic system of human work.

And if we consider a CBDC to still count as cryptocurrency, in my opinion we've just shifted the goal posts from a decentralised, anonymous, revolutionary, grass-roots form of digital currency to the technical underpinnings of the digitisation process of the global banking system.

The current centralization is what keeps it "stable". This stability makes the currency lose it's value in a very gradual way. Only housing, property, education, and healthcare are gaining value at a outlier rate.

Decentralization will incentivize hoarding. Why spend crypto when it might go to the moon tomorrow. Maybe that is a feature, maybe not.

I don't judge.

You're being downvoted but as someone running an AI generation site, I can't even imagine the kind of bottom of the barrel filth you'd attract not even having the tiny deterrent of KYC.

You wouldn't end up being "just another generation site with crypto", you'd become a magnet for everyone who's generating things they're scared of having their legal identity tied to.

Please stop with FUD.

No, I don't want to upload my passport and personal information to some site.

No, I don't want to use Paypal or credit cards

No, I'm not a criminal. I value my privacy, as many others do.

FUD implies I'm not certain of the outcome.

I had to stop supporting logged out users because 99% of the CSAM generated on the site came from people trying to skirt the basic login requirements.

Sorry but your privacy doesn't trump my not wanting to run a child porn site, and the overwhelming majority of the public manages to live through having to login in and pay for things with traceable money.

And before the conversation goes there: is it a perfect filter? No. But a 99% reduction (realistically near 100% reduction) in unwanted behavior is what I'd call very effective.

Before we can continue this conversation, please submit your passport pictures to the hackernews team.

Because otherwise hackernews will be filled with spam. We don't want hackernews to be running a child porn site and this will reduce 99% of that risk.

Giving away your personal privacy isn't the only option and you know that.

The moment you say "Please stop with FUD" I instantly assume that the reason you're actually worried about FUD is because it's directly linked to the value of your tokens.

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