Hacker News Reader

Parallel economies are banned. Try making a new currency in the US.

Economies can work without currencies. It's a little inconvenient, but bartering/trading goods for services was common in the depression when nobody had any cash.

Interestingly, new ad-hoc currencies pop up all over in times like that:

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/history/europes-economic-...

https://collectingpapermoney.spmc.org/wiki/Scrip_Issued_duri...

Printing money is lucrative for the printer so any time it might get even a little bit useful and feasible for other parties somebody will start printing.

Did we just ignore the last fifteen years of crypto?

No I had the speculative ponzi front of mind when making that comment.

Governments love crypto because it lets you seize lots of money from criminals across borders. And it is legal gambling where you can tax the winnings without reimbursing the losers (unless they can offset it but most probably can not)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com