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Comment by larsonf | Hacker News Reader

Interesting (slight?) counterexample is the foreign exchange market 10-20 years ago, just as it was going electronic. Lots of levered investment but lots and lots of fraud as there was almost no regulation. Like this example, you would have brokerages just take customer funds and then just disappear. The move towards foreign exchange trading was, also like bitcoin, driven by the lack of regulation, speculative possibilities, etc. Since then it's become regulated heavily globally and the game-theoretic defection has not held. Probably something similar will happen to bitcoin.

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That's an interesting point. However, I think that the difference between forex and bitcoin in this situation is the goal of the end user. Many bitcoin users are using it because of the anonymity that the system provides, whereas users making large forex trades 10-20 years ago were mostly happy to add regulation and accountability to make sure that they received their money.

Forex traders may have been attracted to a market without regulation but their customers were there to make foreign currency trades. I'm sure that not as many bitcoin users would be happy to lose their anonymity to gain that accountability.

True. Perhaps fundamentally bitcoin really just is cash and not a speculative instrument. And just like cash (as in, like, paper money), there's a huge amount of risk whenever a nontrivial amount of your net worth is tied up in it.

What about the other side of regulation? Not from customers demanding safety but from governments demanding reporting? (E.g. anti-money laundering, tax-evasion laws, commodity markets laws)

I don't know nearly enough about the mechanics of bitcoin to say anything remotely meaningful, but it seems like there is no way that bitcoin won't be regulated like any other commodity. At least in the US, the CFTC will absolutely regulate it by criminalizing anyone for not registering their holdings. Or, even outside of commodities, you could get something like FACTA that forces people/banks to report stores of value in offshore centers where US citizens are involved. This is all US-centric, sure, but why wouldn't it be like this generally? Or, rather, do the mechanics of bitcoin mean you could stay anonymous while not becoming a criminal under the regulation that is going to come?

I disagree. Anyone using bitcoin to he anonymous is doing it wrong; all their transactions are public. Bitcoin is a fine replacement for traditional banking, because there is no way to add ridiculous fees and no way to freeze your assets.

>>Many bitcoin users are using it because of the anonymity that the system provides [...]

I'd say that more and more bitcoin users are using it because of the hype, not because of the anonymity.

>>I'm sure that not as many bitcoin users would be happy to lose their anonymity to gain that accountability.

Maybe not yet. But if everybody currently holding and hyping bitcoin achieves their goal of mainstream adoption, then at that point the new majority bitcoin user demographic will probably be very happy to lose anonymity to gain accountability.

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