I've been wondering if/when China would start tightening their rules.
However I'm not entirely clear from the article exactly what the status of crypto in china now is. It's not clear to me from the quoted statement if it is actually illegal to use crypto to pay for something or to hold or transfer it, or if it's something a bit more subtle and limited.
bitcoin in China is mainly for speculation and money laundering. It is illegal for business to take bitcoins and operate exchanges. I don't think holding it or transferring it would be a problem, that's the base of bitcoin's decentralization.
There are A LOT scams going on with all coins, people put money into it without knowing anything about cryptocurrency. If you read recent news about Evergrande, when Chinese people invest money for speculation, no one is considering the risk of losing money. I wonder if this has something to do with this.
Financial institutions cant deal with it, no exchanges, no ICO's. They shut all the doors a while back. How do you use or own something when all legal avenues are closed unless you just do it illegally which is probably what some are doing.
There are changes. E.g. the 2017 announcement doesn't mention 衍生品 (derivatives) at all, while the 2021 announcement explicitly lists trading them among the prohibited activities.
The use of “illegal” in this article is highly ambiguous.
I can't read the text and be certain whether it means that transactions in it are prohibited, or that it simply does not have the same status as legal tender, as in currency that companies are required to accept.
This seems to me the same as their old pronouncements. Nothing new as in newsworthy. Maybe they are doing this as a reminder of their older announcements? Sort of like "I told you so!"
A friend of mine that works in the industry as a business developer for Chinese blockchain firms since 2017 said the exact same thing!
My market perspective:
"Everything is priced in."
Apparently, not in the crypto markets. Old news is new news, apparently.
Policy perspective:
The more DeFi becomes a thing, the less a policy like this will matter. It will still matter a lot, but it will pack less of a punch due to decentralized services.
My overall perspective:
If crypto still feels as speculative (in terms of trading crypto) 10 years later, then I feel the experiment to find a good use-case has ran for long enough.
>If crypto still feels as speculative (in terms of trading crypto) 10 years later, then I feel the experiment to find a good use-case has ran for long enough.
Maybe I'm taking this to a place you didn't intend, or maybe this is an ignorant question but. . . .
What is the US market now, compared to 10 years ago. My experience is that 10 years ago Bitcoin was used to either buy drugs, or as a bet made by college kids that they could make easy money.
And. Well. It seems still pretty much the same in terms of existing primarily as a speculative tool.
I'd agree, but I'm willing to wait and see for 10 more years. For one, I do see some developments nowadays that are making me excited (not money related). Also, tackling blockchain problems is hard.
And in all fairness, the speed at which you can send Ripple and similar cryptocurrencies is actually quite cool. It's a shame that it's mostly in its own little bubble still.
> Bitcoin was used to either buy drugs
In all fairness, I'm not necessarily against it. I'm not pro, but I do believe that many drug laws in most countries are against the idea of freedom. And I find it a comforting yet troubling thought (for different reasons) that cryptocurrencies fight against that (troubling: a 13 year old buying/using some very strong drugs, comforting: a 31 year old doing it for experimentation -- freedom is important).
I swear I spend half my upvotes these days on grey comments that, AFAICT, someone simply disagrees with. In this case, the commenter was foolish enough to answer someone's question in a manner free from jackassery; stay classy, HN.
I hope the rest of world follows. There is nothing more volatile than a decentralised crypto currency. The amount of people making a profit from it is less than 5% and energy consumption is beyond acceptable.
Crypto as a tech to serve something different is totally fine of course.
So you'd rather a system where TPTB get to fudge the books as they see fit, impose taxes via intentional inflation, and keep tabs on your every transaction? Interesting.
That's what ends up happening when an asset becomes economically meaningful. Crypto is still a joke to global economy, but on the off chance it gains mainstream adoption, it'll have the same kind of regulations, taxation and fraud attached to it.
Except crypto is less firmly anchored in the real world than in the digital realm. It's fundamentally harder to regulate it than a physical currency, which needs specialist equipment to generate.
Money as a concept is even less anchored in the real world. So is the law. The two have been dancing together since first human society. We have thousands of years of experience with this, and cryptocurrencies don't introduce anything new here, despite what some advocates may think.
As long as you can use something - be it a coin, a bill, a SWIFT transfer, a blockchain transaction or a Nuka-Cola bottle cap - to pay someone for something, and a third party would be able to identify it as a purchase, same things will happen. A criminal will be able to take your purchasing power and use it themselves. A taxman will be able to collect a percentage of your trade, and men with guns will take you in front of a judge if you refuse.
The manifestation of value doesn't matter, because money isn't a thing, it's a shared belief.
While I agree, all of the ways you mentioned to pay for something are fundamentally something that requires infrastructure to create (industrial, banking, or a mint), and has a physical anchor that can be plucked from you by physical force (including the SWIFT transfer - though usually bank's prefer to comply than shut themselves down).
A blockchain based currency will exist as long as there's someone with a sufficiently powerful computing device connected to a sufficiently low-risk network that can be accessed legally or illicitly. A blockchain wallet will exist and be yours alone as long as you keep the password in your brain, never write it down, and resist attempts to extract it from you.
This means that, in comparison to conventional currency (including Nuka-Cola caps), a blockchain economy is much easier to operate undercover when it's outlawed.
Not exactly, that is true - it is rather hard to describe international trade in 140 characters-or-less. It can not be denied that there is a lot of truth to the statement though even if it does not describe all factors of influence:
> a system where TPTB get to fudge the books as they see fit
This depends on whether the media are in to the party or not but when they are this is mostly true.
> impose taxes via intentional inflation
This is a fact in those countries which have control over their own currency.
> and keep tabs on your every transaction
This is a fact and one of the driving forces behind the "cashless society".
2) The expansion of the money supply is not necessarily inflationary.
3) Inflation is very different from taxation: if you hold cash you’re supposed to circulate it, either by spending it or by investing it. Inflation disincentivizes cash-hoarding, and also deflated the value of any debt you might have.
1) ...but I can only assume you realise they are sensitive to political pressure which again derives from public opinion which is controlled by the media...
2) ...but it generally is just that, inflationary. The fact that there can be exceptions to the rule does not make the rule less valid.
3) ...and inflation is also used by governments to provide funds (by "printing money" in some way or other, the actual implementation depends on how the currency is regulated) which otherwise would be provided through taxation, leading to inflation and as such reducing tax payer's purchasing power - just like taxation does.
1) central bank loss of independence is one of the hallmark of failed central banks. I hardly think it's reasonable to think that all central banks are dysfunctional in such a way: while these institutions can and do break down, they are not designed to break down in this way. You're free to argue whether a given central bank is or is not sufficiently independent, but that's a more specific problem than the over-generalization made here.
2) it's not an exception to the rule at all. The rule for inflation doesn't mention how much money exists, it only mentions how much money circulates. More money existing does not necessarily mean more money circulating (eg.: money tends to concentrate in certain places for various reasons, rather than diffusing freely).
3) Sure, but two things that have similar features are not always similar in essence or nature. Swords and needles are both sharp, but you wouldn't argue that they're essentially the same. In fact in your own example, taxation for certain purposes could be either inflationary or deflationary (eg.: austerity measures, including those that involve taxation, are deflationary by design).
Only PoW cryptos need extensive electricity and hardware. Its completely absurd to ban crypto. Thats like if you would ban all motorized vehicles to get rid of coal blasting diesel trucks without catalytic converter.
Needless to say that its also technically impossible to ban crypto. Its like banning torrents or even harder and we all know torrent was attacked heavily in the past but it did not go away.
Performing 51% attacks in the hope of discrediting an asset would be a waste of resources. Such an attack on the Bitcoin ecosystem would nowadays cost several billion in hardware and electricity, and all the community has to do in order to repair the damage would be a hark fork. 51% attacks happened in the past and most of them had little to no impact on major assets.
Well, for the energy consumption part yes. There the need for banning crypto concerns those "currencies" which do use PoW. Like Bitcoin what the article was about.
Banning crypto in a practical sense is actually quite easy. Prohibit any business and any bank in dealing with them. If you cannot do legal transactions with e.g. Bitcoins any more, the market mostly dries up. It is not necessary to ban any single coin in existance, but its wide-scale usage in the normal economy.
By the way, there was never an attempt to ban torrents itself. That would have been reasonably easy on a protocol level. It was about banning illegal torrents. As in the content, not the protocol.
Oddly enough besides the hard-core aficionados and techies that would mostly leave the criminals, who would operate street level informal exchange systems.
The whole point for criminals is that it allows pseudonymous (or anonymous, in the case of monero), and remote dealing of illegal goods and services. Especially across international borders.
Another use is tax evasion and money laundering.
Why is crypto any better than cash if users are forced to deal in person? I understand the argument of not having to carry around a duffel bag that could be seized. But nations can disrupt crypto markets on a global scale.
At the very least, they can make it difficult to exchange for actual, usable, local currency. Which appears to be what China is poised to do.
For them, that would be back to square one in terms of money laundering.
Odds are that, given fiat to launder, or crypto that needs to be converted to fiat that still needs to be laundered, they would cut the useless step.
The only illegal industry that would still see the use for it is maybe ransomware, but ransomware is not a cyclic business, so it would be surprising that they'd find enough individuals on the street to convert their millions easily.
Drugs are addictive which is why people continue to use them even when illegal. Why would people use illegal crypto? It was hard enough to use them as a currency when legal, them being illegal would make them mostly worthless to most people.
Drugs are the thing people have a strong incentive to accept crypto for, not pizzas.
All black markets have an incentive to use it - including state actors (e.g. weapons deals). Getting caught laundering Monero is preferable to getting caught selling missiles to the Saudis.
You misses the point. There is no reason to ban anything.
You can also buy Pokemon cards and sell or trade them. Call them funny money cards if you want, but there is no legitimate reason why people should not be able to buy/sell them.
Also plenty places have already put cryptos in the laws declared them as alternative currency so they cant really prevent financial institution form handling it.
If they really would globally cut crypto form fiat. You wouldn't need to pay taxes with anything you do with crypt anymore since its just "funny money" this would boost crypto and devalue fiat and cause all kind of horrible side effects. You have in incentive to get paid in funny money if you dont have to tax it.
This is just anecdotal, but some people run their GPU for mining during Winter since its 'free heat'. This basically renders the GPU into a space heater, which is 3x-4x less efficient than a heat pump.
Additionally, some individuals steal electricity (eg. from their workplace, or if they have electricity included in their rental contract). Cryptocurrencies have thus conveniently enabled a form of electricity theft and fraud previously impossible for the individual.
Steel manufacturing requires tons of electricity, and it is already impossible in EU without enormous subsidies. It's an industry surviving entirely on life support.
Governments want a healthy steelmaking industry so when the time comes to defend your country you can make guns and tanks. When your country is being invaded how useful is your bitcoin going to be?
> When your country is being invaded how useful is your bitcoin going to be?
You can bribe enemy army staff with it.
But seriously, just how much is too much when it comes to steel subsidies, and just how much EU can tolerate its steel industry failing so hard to upgrade?
Rather than subsidising, say, buying new, more efficient blast furnaces EU countries basically just spend few hundred dollars extra of taxpayer money per ton of steel.
It would not. Hardly anyone mines in Europe. Ironically power shortages are due to ESG initiatives that phased out power stations using fossil fuels and left unreliable power sources of wind and solar
No, why? I have investments in a couple of private startups. I definitely care who other investors are, and I don't want them to take money from bad guys.
Yep, you also can't opt out of the impact on the semiconductor market, the e-waste production (kinda part of the climate too), the ransomware explosion, the wider economic consequences of LITERAL BILLION DOLLAR PONZI SCHEMES…
You can't also opt out of the Swift/Visa/MasterCard climate impact, or the ATM network, or the internet! how many millions of servers are running, day and night, to host millions of terabytes of content where only a fraction ends up being accessed ...and it's a cat video
What you can do is use and support the climate friendlier alternatives. There are crypto currencies created with that in mimd
It's true, and I'm allowed to (and do) care about the emissions of those, too. I'm objecting to the idea that I shouldn't be allowed to care (“don't use it duh”) as a non-user.
I am encouraged to see the transition to PoS and would love to see PoS overtake PoW, just from a bystander-concerned-about-the-environment perspective.
I do agree that PoW in a big scale is stupid. Those resources could be used to host cloud services, compute big important problems, etc...
PoW by now is basically PoS with extra steps
But, even for the environment, I can't take people thinking it is a good idea govs using PoW, or standard exchange problems, to ban All crypto-currencies. While creating their own fake digital coin
PoS is also not ideal since it keeps promoting the same rules has the old system. Who has more money will keep having more independent if their producing something useful
So I think we still need something new, and someone smart to come up with it
Something that works for big groups, like a combination of localized PoW plus global PoS with PoT. Proof of trust, like most systems work
There are some concerns which I share, that Bitcoin, when it finally fails, leaves huge damages to all financial markets as too much money is already bound in there. And directly, the environmental damage done by bitcoin is quite severe, so everyone should be concerned about that.
One can claim many things about the parent comment. But it's all directed to the topic at hand.
Cheers!
[1] The best interpretation I can come up with is: yes the energy issue with crypto/bitcoin are an actual problem to solve. Yes, using crypto might be a good use-case in certain situations. While I don't believe the profit claim (there's no source), I can't disprove it either. So it poses an interesting question as to whether that's true.
It's ok to not like crypto but how about sticking to the truth?
* There's many things much more volatile than crypto, the biggest markets being vix if you're a hedgefund and pretty much all derivates like options if you're a gambling man. btc in particular is only 2x from many traditional markets: https://charts.woobull.com/bitcoin-volatility-vs-other-asset...
* The second part of only 5% making a profit is made up and makes no sense. There's not a lot of days since it's inception where you could buy and hold some btc and it wouldn't be more worth later on. Sure if you fomo at a local top and panic sell the bottom you can get burned but it's an easy trade my guess would be more like 80% but like your number it's also just made up.
* Energy consumption you need to put it into relation of comparable resources, of course if you're determined it's worthless it's hard to justify any cost even if it's minor in comparison but that's a personal opinion of yours and many disagree.
I also wonder when people voicing environmental concerns will accept that there's a whole slew of newer Proof-of-stake blockchains that aren't using that much energy.
One might disagree on what exactly is a comparable resource. A digital currency could just as well store everyone's balance in a giant SQL database. In exchange for utter centralization the energy consumption drops to essentially zero. IIUC a PoS coin will also have much smaller energy consumption. So we have a situation where a collection of people are using huge, huge amounts of energy to speculate not only on digital assets, but on decentralizedPoW digital assets.
Do you have any resources or studies to describe this more? I have really struggled to find actually nuanced discussions and unbiased sources for this. It’s all at the extremes of it’s either the worst thing ever to not a problem at all.
I’d also be interested in comparisons to energy usage of say servers that run Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc.
A lot of the energy consumption argument against bitcoin stems from this study [1]. Some have pointed out flaws in the study that over inflate the consumption numbers. This has sparked various indexes that have tried to measure the consumption in an unbiased way [2].
Additional studies [3] have shown that 39% of bitcoin miners are using renewables.
The energy consumption argument has led some to investigate the energy consumption of other assets such as gold with some estimating the energy requirements for gold to be 50x that of mining bitcoin [4].
Whenever energy consumption of other assets are pointed out to be higher than bitcoin the debate then shifts to utility; e.g it’s ok if Y consumes X energy because Y provides Z to society.
Some bitcoin miners are finding interesting way to utilize the heat produced by their mining equipment [5]. And some say that bitcoin mining can help reduce the cost of producing new green energy infrastructure since excess power that would’ve been wasted could be used for bitcoin mining to offset costs.
I agree with you that it is tough to find unbiased info on the subject.
“Nothing more volatile…” erm energy prices in the UK just jumped 70% and it’s not to do with crypto, co2 supply shrank to levels never seen before again nothing to do with crypto both of which affect whole populations. Try to avoid crypto hyperbole. Lastly, I don’t know anybody invested in crypto that hasn’t made money, so anecdotally that indicates the number is much higher than 5%.
That's the massive problem with decentralized "currencies". Even if the Colombian peso is used by 0.6% of people in the world, it's still a currency because lots of people can pay with it in almost all their interactions with the economy. If a decentralized global "currency" is used by 0.6% of people, it's not a currency because almost nobody around you accepts it. Even at 6% it would not be a currency. Maybe at 60%, but how do you get there from 0.6% in the first place?
Define volatile. The only currency that has stood the test of time is gold, a private currency. Every fiat currency in history has failed.
Probably because heads of state like to print it to solve their short term problems essentially robbing everyone with an inflation tax. I dont call that stable or just. I work and save and expect my currency to hold up and not be abused which is not happening currently.
Edit: HN must be the worst platform in existence to debate. I have about 700 karma and cant comment more than 3 times on this thread. Your rules are not helping discussion or clearing clutter, they're just really annoying. Retrac: no ive hit a limit and cant respond anymore on the whole thread even with only a few comments.
That's funny. The extant fiat currencies haven't failed. So, the only ones that have failed... are the failed ones. And those have failed, 100%, indeed.
Actually all the euro area currencies that were removed from circulation in exchange for euros; franc, deutchmark, lira etc. did not fail at all.
Thus, not every currency has failed, although it could be argued that they still exist in a 'shadow' form, thus have not yet existed to the end of the infinite timeline.
Either way every failed currency has indeed failed, thus every currency in the future that fails will also be considered to be a failure, maintaining the 100% record for failure.
All of Europe's have. All of Asia's have. The Euro is too new.
Only the dollar arguably has endured the last 150 years, depending on how you consider its three redefinition with the foundation of the Fed system, then Bretton Woods and then with the abandonment of the gold standard..
Except gold is not a currency. It's a commodity. Gold coins used to be a currency in certain times and places. Insofar as they're not recognized anymore, at least where I live, they've actually failed.
I believe the Canadian maple series of gold and silver coins have some face value, and you can spend them like that if you wish. 1oz gold = 50CAD FV, and 1oz Silver = 5CAD if I'm not mistaken. However when you try to bring them across borders they are evaluated at their numanistic value.
Sure, there are countries where noble metal coins are still currency. That doesn't mean that this proves that "gold as currency has stood the test of time".
Hacker News has a short delay before you can reply to a new comment. I think precisely to stop instant replies and give people a chance to think about it?
Anyway. There's a cute video out there I can't find now of a man trying to use gold in New York to buy something. Anything. The results indicate its use as a currency was questionable. (No one would accept it as payment.)
I’m giving the parent comment the benefit of the doubt that they’re not an agent working to preserve the current financial system, at least not deliberately. Especially since their sentiment is so frequently expressed on these boards, it is bordering on consensus.
There's pretty much nothing different to serve with bitcoin-style "public blockchain" tech. Nothing needs to be trustless, and nothing would securely work as trustless without currency-style incentives (why namecoin is a coin, etc.). (And "private blockchain" is just a term based on marketing hype tied to bitcoin, there's no new tech there, that fundamentally just means incorporating the same concepts as Git.)
Is what you say less true of traditional exchanges? Maybe it is, but I haven't seen someone crunch the numbers - I'd be happy to read a comparison to that effect.
Only PoW cryptos need extensive electricity and hardware.
Dont make crypto just bitcoins. If you really want to help make a dent in the energy consumption then people need to move away from PoW coins not from crypto in general.
If you believe in free market capitalism, people should migrate from PoW to PoS coins, because PoS coins provide the same features with less expenses.
In practice this won't happen, because PoS coins don't deliver the same features (security, decentralization, permissionless) or the market doesn't believe they do.
Also the savings with PoS are not passed to the users of the cryptocurrency, but to the stakers, or big holders of the cryptocurrency. How do we even know, that these people will spend the money they make using some more enviromentally friendly way? Maybe they just buy lambos with the money and fly around with private jets.
Mining is quite small amount of the total transacted amount of BTC daily, and people are willing to pay the cost. If you want to replace Bitcoin with some more enviromentally friendly thing, you have to offer the same capabilities (or better). PoS coins fail to deliver this.
PoS is not the successor of PoW. FBA consensus is. PoS is and always was just a adjusted new version of same idea that only removed the energy problem. The comparison between PoW and PoS is a useless distraction. Its like comparing diesel ICEs with gas ICEs ignoring EVs completely.
>and people are willing to pay the cost.
No they are not. BTC runs on the block reward not on the fees.
Without block reward the average Tx fee would be like 150 USD. (Not accounting for the fact that this would significantly drop the number of Tx which would then raise the cost for the rest of the transaction even higher.)
> In practice this won't happen, because PoS coins don't deliver the same features (security, decentralization, permissionless) or the market doesn't believe they do.
It's been what, 2 or 3 years since decent PoS designs were introduced to the market? The crypto market is still trying to tell the difference between their right foot and a private key. Give it a few more years and eventually the market will settle convincingly on a design it values the most, be it PoW, PoS, or something else.
In the mean time, it's silly imo to say that the market has decided. The crypto space is still a volatile bloodbath of old chains dying and new competitors rising.
Education and time. There is a limited number of people who can not see that PoW does not work long term and more importantly that we have working alternatives like FBA consensus. Once all (most) of these people bough BTC it can only go down hill long term because people who actually want to use it will move away as its simply to expensive.
Side-chains dont solve the problem no matter how many and how performant they are. On the main-chain the fees need to eventually cover the cost of running the network i.e. the whole energy, hardware and human labor. Currently this is still mostly paid by the block reward (aka paid by inflation). This pays about a quarter million USD every 10 minutes. It doesn't need much common sense to figure out that if the combined fees of all peoples transaction need to result in a quarter million USD every 10 minute then transaction can not be cheap.
Bitcoin is currently running on subsidy by its own block reward that pays about as much as google pays for operation.
The average Tx fee is currently a few dollar but a subsidy of about 140 dollar is added form the block reward.
Non-PoW based systems have outperformed bitcoin in terms of transaction for years with average Tx fees of less than a cent.
Shouldn't this be enough incentivize? Surely it is for thous who actuality want to use the system. The gamblers and maxis will probably hodl their bag forever but once it loses market relevant it will sharply become insecure as well and the whole thing should collapse. Might take another 10 years, who knows but it eventually has to fail. Its like ICE cars vs. EVs it was always just a matter of time but it felt like it took forever.
>How exactly do you think you could dethrone Bitcoin, overcoming its gigantic first-mover advantage?
If you look at the bigger picture BTC loses market share and there is no sign that this will change.
The gains are below average so people who only gamble have an incentive to gamble with something else.
Looks like FBA is not "trustless", which is actually excellent, but I'm not sure how that would fly in the current (criminal and fraudulent) cryptocurrency economy.
Only PoW cryptocurrencies can be fairly distributed and avoid wealth concentration (although many fail to do so by concentrating most of emission in just the first few years).
Fair distribution is not only completely subjective, but also meaningless. Given enough time, any valuable asset's distribution will be heavily concentrated in the hands of the rich.
> Given enough time, any valuable asset's distribution will be heavily concentrated in the hands of the rich.
That reads like a tautology—they're called "the rich" because they have wealth, so naturally if you look at the distribution of assets most will be in the hands of the rich. One doesn't accumulate assets purely by being rich, however, as many a lottery winner can attest. Barring the occasional (and usually short-lived) windfall, for the most part those who attain wealth do so because they possess certain habits and preferences related to saving and investing. Even if you reset the distribution of wealth those tendencies would remain and bring about a gradual return to the original economic structure.
This is not true, saturation points on staking pools exist to encourage people moving to other pools, this causes more decentralization not less. Additionally, from a hardware perspective setting up a pool takes significantly less capital compared to PoW mining.
That's incorrect, especially in the context of bitcoin given how concentrated early emissions were, which you mentioned. A years-long ico, or incentives paid to users, would serve the same function but without economic waste.
At the same time it's true that no l1 to date did that on any non-negligible scale, and starting now would take years.
You are alluding to PoS i assume. I never really understood that argument. How is wealth getting concentrated when the relative distribution of coins stays exactly the same?
But if those owners want to do anything with that capital they have to sell coins leading to more distribution. Plus you also have to pay taxes on staking income leading to more sales. But yes those shennanigans of many chain founders are certainly a problem.
I won't downplay the environmental consequences of PoW, but the actual reason so many governments are speeding the push against crypto might be related to a future of high inflation and high gov debt. It would be the perfect storm for mainstream crypto adoption.
The bubble has been ongoing for a decade now. I suppose the challenge will be what is the line in the sand where it isn't a bubble? There isn't a lot of good evidence it is in a bubble.
This thing also poses a real threat to SWIFT and anyone trying to put together a successor to SWIFT. The US has been weaponising international currency transfers for a while now, and China would be facing problems controlling capital flows if people could just send money internationally without much consequence. There are good, selfish, reasons for why governments would intervene.
Nonsense. Why would any sane person move a large part of their assets into something as volatile as crypto? If you want to protect yourself against inflation, buy real estate or equities if your time horizon is long enough. Even fixed income once rates are a bit better. But for the average person please stay clear of crypto!
If your time horizon is long enough, volatility shouldn't matter. Historically speaking Bitcoin is getting less volatile with every market cycle. I would not be surprised if in the future its volatility is comparable to the S&P500.
Why would any sane person invest in real estate? You have maintenance costs, property taxes, it's not liquid and you can go years with little growth. Not to mention if your area see's hard economic times (i.e. Detroit), the chance of a rebound is slim.
You also ignore the premise being put forth, that Bitcoin as a currency still isn't ideal. You don't think "long term investment" with currency so much as short to medium term. Like, will bread and milk cost 10x as much next week?
"Stop thinking investment and start thinking survival" might be a good way to put it.
Does that logic applies in China? Are real state or equities a protection from volatility on a self proclaimed communist country? What about South America, Lebanon or Turkey?
The incontestable precious and invaluable wisdom of the hacker news poster who potentially lives on US California or some rich western country on a comfortably fat salary.
For China specifically, the reason to hate crypto currency is because it's a system where they don't have control. It's the same reason they are cracking down on the tech sector and Hong Kong. The CCP does not like having competitors for power or even something they don't have control over.
> The CCP does not like having competitors for power or even something they don't have control over.
The CCP is a bunch of unambitious individuals. Everything that causes troubles to the CCP means troubles for Xi and the possibility that his "president for life" title might be revoked, creating room for somebody else to ascend.
From a game theory standpoint it is better to be at the helm of a slightly less relevant organization than being a subordinate of an organization plowing ahead at full steam unrivaled.
This is even more true in politics and NGOs where the monetary compensation is very limited and it's all about the status.
> the actual reason so many governments are speeding the push against crypto might be related to a future of high inflation and high gov debt
The reason why we have inflation and debt is to keep the value of our currencies stable. IE, if people want to use dollars, the US government can print more dollars to satisfy the demand. (And thus keep the value stable.)
Cryptocurrency's volatile value is a result of its inability to "print money" when more people want to use it.
Remember: Currency is not an investment. A good currency has a stable value over time; otherwise it's very difficult to conduct commerce.
Stability operates on short and long time scales. 2% annual inflation means a currency is worth 99.994% as much tomorrow as it was today which in practice is generally fine.
Even fairly high inflation levels of say 7% annually can still be quite stable on a daily or monthly basis which is all you really need. As most people spend most of their paycheck every month and savings aren’t limited to the currency in question.
By comparison crypto coins tend to have much higher daily and monthly variations which isn’t a big deal for savings, but in practice it discourages their use for day to day expenses.
You should look more into the real causes of inflation in your country, because they are probably not what you think
Even without knowing what country you are from, I would bet that inflation is because imports and exports imbalances and nothing to do with "printing too much money".
And anyway, if the problem is storing value, why you don't buy gold or dollars, yens or something like that?
There is a huge difference between moderate inflation and ruinous hyperinflation. For example, before last year Australia had gone almost 30 years without a recession [0], in large part because their central bank's inflation target is a few points higher than the US's hard 2% ceiling. This gives their bank more flexibility in controlling the money supply.
That kind of stability is more beneficial to the middle class than any negatives that may come with that level of inflation.
"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."[1]
And if you're going to break the guidelines and comment on voting anyway, the very least that you could do is also add some value to the discussion, e.g. add some thoughts/elaboration/support for the points made.
> For example, before last year Australia had gone almost 30 years without a recession [0], in large part because their central bank's inflation target is a few points higher than the US's hard 2% ceiling.
Australia has gone 30 years without recession because we're supplying commodities like iron into the most miraculously productive miracle in all of recorded history, aka mainland China. And because we've got one of the highest rates of net migration in the developed world.
On a per capita basis Australia has had recessions, and it is a stretch to say that our inflation target did anything relative to all the other countries that have inflation targets.
And that's fine. If you need stuff now, spend; if you don't, invest, at whatever risk level you're comfortable with. Just hanging onto purchasing power while doing neither is bad for the economy if too many people try it.
I will concede that switching out of a high-inflation currency to a stable one is a good idea, and that for many people using cryptocurrency is the only way of circumventing their country's laws on the subject.
However, bitcoin experiences 10-20% drops against the USD on a regular basis. It looks like this announcement has triggered another one. It's not stable, it's just (a) appreciated over time a lot and (b) is doing better against the USD than, say, the Argentine peso.
> By definition, inflation is what happens when the price of a currency is not stable
Inflation is what happens when the price of goods and services in a currency is not stable. It can be triggered without a change in the money supply by underlying shocks to the real economy (e.g. 70s oil shocks)
Bitcoin claims to guarantee money supply stability, but it cannot guarantee price stability.
> But in countries with high inflation, such as mine, you will lose money if all your wealth is stored as fiat
That's also the case in countries with low inflation. That's why, in the US, wealthy people don't stuff cash in mattresses, or keep most of their wealth in general bank accounts. They buy stocks, bonds, real estate, ect. This is also why, in the US, investment vehicles like 401ks and IRAs are highly encouraged.
Not true, if money supply does not grow with population or economic growth it will be deflationary aka not stable. If deflation continues then people will hold onto money rather than buy things with it since things become relatively cheaper every day, which leads to economic downturn.
Is that a bad thing? Items would become more durable, planned obsolescence for products would all but disappear. Things would need to last a long time otherwise people won't spend on it. It would be good for landfills, fewer electronics and plastic garbage. I think it's sad that people in 2020s aftaid to hold savings because they know if they don't spend it, their buying power is reduced tomorrow.
> A stable currency would have an inflation rate of 0%
Sure, and if the government had centralized control of all prices, it could mandate that. Since it doesn't (even those that assert that power don't have it in practice), what it seeks to do, as far as stability, is try to acheive low short-term price volatility, and as it turns out, experience shows that low-to-moderate inflation helps with that.
The M1 [0] tracks physical currency in the economy. It would appear there is a rather large amount of literal money printing afoot. So while a sharp turn to dictatorship could stabilise the currency, there are probably less extreme measures the US government could take to keep inflation at 0%. 75% of (physical, not the important ones in bank accounts) dollars literally appeared after 2016.
The M1 isn't the measure that matters - but it is a fact that large amounts of money are appearing from somewhere and that is probably the most significant factor in the currency losing value. Price controls are an overreaction, there are easier ways to make the currency more stable.
A stable currency would have a stable Velocity. This is something both USD(which is inflationary) and BTC(which is deflationary) get wrong. We need a flationary currency.
Current inflation is due to the government “creating money” for the COVID-19 stimulus, the fact that governments can even do that is what’s so good about fiat currency.
Bailouts are another benefit. Governments can at will dull or even prevent financial contagion thus preventing another Great Depression.
All this has a cost in the form of inflation until the money is reabsorbed of course but it’s better than economic collapse.
> As a democracy, there's no alternative to the government working with whatever majority it gets.
The government managed to sell the need for the military industrial complex.
The military is the most popular branch of the Federal Governemnt whereas the Fed and Treasury linger at 50-60% depending on who is in the WH.
50-60% is very low, that's the reason why Bitcoin thrives. If that number was 92-95% then Bitcoin would not exist.
Is it possible to have that number at 92-95% ? Maybe, maybe not...in any event the answer is not attacking bitcoin because even if Bitcoin is destroyed that remaining 50% void will be filled pretty quickly by something else.
It unfortunately that there is so much misinformation about things like the bailout. A lot of people think that the US government gave the banks free money when in fact it was just a loan of sorts that the banks had to pay back with interest.
In fact the the US government actually made money from the bailout.
> In total, U.S. government economic bailouts related to the global financial crisis had federal outflows (expenditures, loans, and investments) of $633.6 billion and inflows (funds returned to the Treasury as interest, dividends, fees, or stock warrant repurchases) of $754.8 billion, for a net profit of $121 billion.
> It unfortunately that there is so much misinformation about things like the bailout
If you are an organization with 6000 nukes, 22T GDP, largest navy and airforce you don't get to cry about "misinformation".
People don't like QE and bailouts. Period. The burden of the proof is always on the person/organization trying to sell something. Always. For sure the public didn't conceive QE or bailouts and didn't try to sell it to the government.
Bitcoin would not exist if QE and bailouts were marketed by master salesmen such as Steve Jobs, Dana White, Don King or David Geffen
We as investors should operate with what is perceived by the population, not textbooks.
Perceptions move the market, and in the case of Bitcoin perception created a market. From 0 to 2 trillions in 10 years.
Shall we just ban everything volatile and/or that uses more energy than you personally find acceptable? Or anything that isn’t profitable for an arbitrary number of its users? I don’t particularly care about cryptocurrency but seeing bandwagon arguments like this at the top of HN threads is frustrating.
You should educate yourself. Energy consumption is an old myth and cryptocurrency pushes a lot of innovations in this field. There is a great documentary on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-7dMVcVWgc.
Energy is a zero sum game. Every watt you use for crypto mining is a watt not used for something more productive.
Every watt of renewable power generated to power a crypto miner, is a watt not being used to reduce the use of non-renewables in the wider energy grid.
I don’t care if your crypto gear is hooked up to a dedicated hydro plant, I care that the hydroplant is not connected to the wider grid and shutting down gas fired power stations.
Clearly he thinks that investments in renewables are a good thing, since those would also "reduce the use of non-renewables in the wider energy grid". So I'm puzzled why you'd think what you just wrote.
"Every watt of renewable power generated to power a crypto miner," IS investment in renewable energy.. which he would rather was not invested in renewable energy. I don't see any other way to interpret that, unless you think that paying monies for renewables is somehow not 'investing' in renewables.
So he is turning down real investment in renewables in the hopes that other more agreeable investment materializes out of thin air.. meanwhile his plan crashes the price of renewable energy endangering those industries and shrinking the market.. allowing established fossil fuel industries a bigger share. genius.
Please don’t overestimate the importance of crypto in this world. Crypto investments in renewables are, at best, a rounding error. The ROI from them certainly won’t offset the very real harm being done by all the additional fossil plants being brought online to deal with the increased demand they create.
Fossil fuels being used to fill demand of any sort is its own problem. We need global carbon taxes on a Montreal Protocol level to incentivize any excess demand (investment) to target renewables. -But with this, crypto would be a great boost to renewable technology, guaranteeing a minimum return for business investing in Research and Development.
Its not unique either. There’s a company in the U.K. that bought an old coal plant, to convert to gas operators, to provide power solely for a crypto mining operation.
Simple fact of the matter is that it currently cheaper and easier for miners to use fossil fuels, then build renewables. Which is exactly what they’re doing.
> So he is turning down real investment in renewables
No, he's not.
> meanwhile his plan crashes the price of renewable energy endangering those industries and shrinking the market.. allowing established fossil fuel industries a bigger share
It seems that you have completely missed the past four decades of renewable energy decreasing in price by a factor of 100x. The result of this decrease was not "endangering those industries", but rather making them viable in the first place and broadening the market massively. As per Jevons, the energy market doesn't shrink when prices get lower.
I'm puzzled as to how someone could make such a glaringly obvious mistake.
>It seems that you have completely missed the past four decades of renewable energy decreasing in price by a factor of 100x.
And it seems you have completely missed the fact that investment from crypto miners helped to bring this efficiency saving about, if there wasn't so much demand, there would be nothing to invest in R&D and infrastructure that inevitably lower prices.
Crypto, or specifically PoW acts like a guarantee of sale under a certain price per KwH. It used to be necessary for governments to guarantee power prices, and offer subsidies to encourage investment in their countries infrastructure. PoW in part replaces this necessity and encourages companies to invest in renewable, efficient, power production.
You are completely ignoring the fact that even if connected to the grid all power grids are structured to meet peak demand, and that there will always exist periods of excess power which, until bitcoin, had to go to ground.
Bitcoin makes use of energy that would otherwise be unused.
We don’t operate renewable grids in most of the world, and for most of the world renewable energy supply isn’t great enough to supply the dips without fossil supplements.
All that means is that in almost all scenarios bitcoin mining will be directly causing an increase usage of non-renewable energy. There are of course certain times and places where this doesn’t hold true and there’s a genuine surplus of renewable power that can’t be stored. But that’s an exception not the rule. Try and tell me with a straight face that the majority of power consumed by crypto is surplus renewable energy.
Only from the view of the universe, not from the view of humans. It cost less energy to drill for oil than the energy you get out of the gasoline. It takes less energy to create a solar panel than what you can get out of it. It takes less energy to labor at the factory for an hour than the energy you get from the 150KwH of power you can buy for your house from that hour of motion you performed at the factory.
If I use some electricity to run PoW on an electronic litecoin transaction from me to my friend in Kenya, that's a hell of a lot lower energy than building and operating a Western Union in Kenya isn't it?
> If I use some electricity to run PoW on an electronic litecoin transaction from me to my friend in Kenya, that's a hell of a lot lower energy than building and operating a Western Union in Kenya isn't it?
On an aggregated pre transaction basis we know this isn’t true. Crypto is not more energy efficient than existing financial infrastructure. Additionally you’re comparing a small part of a financial transactions (I.e. and database update) to a complete end-to-end transaction, including turning those digital funds into spendable cash.
Unless you friend in Kenya is also capable of spending that crypto, without turning it into fiat, then example is meaningless, because your ignoring all the infrastructure need to do that fiat conversion.
Additionally Kenya has digital banking infrastructure. Send a SEPA payment instead, no need to Western Union.
>including turning those digital funds into spendable cash.
Crypto can be spendable cash. You can buy a coffee or a bar of gold with it, even bullets. Sounds like it can be used as a currency to me. It only takes a willing counterparty.
> Crypto is not more energy efficient than existing financial infrastructure.
That depends on the place and circumstance. I concede that Kenya was a poor example and I should have used someplace like Central African Republic instead.
>Additionally Kenya has digital banking infrastructure. Send a SEPA payment instead, no need to Western Union.
Assuming you are one of the one third of Kenyans who have a bank account. And assuming the one sending the money has a bank account. Both of which involve documentation and KYC, something not necessary in most crypto transactions.
>because your ignoring all the infrastructure need to do that fiat conversion
Not really, crypto to fiat can be done informally. There's several people in my city who buy and sell it and all they need is a cellphone and local currency.
It's only from the perspective of someone that thinks like a loser, always trying to find something wrong, that you can find zero uses where using crypto is more energy efficient than other financial options. And not all cryptos use the same energy or transaction cost as others.
For an example of transaction efficiency, I can buy a bar of gold from some established bullion vendors in litecoin much cheaper than with a visa card due to lower transaction risks for the merchant and lower transaction fees. If you can't wait multiple days for an ACH transaction and have to buy precious metals online, crypto is actually the cheapest way in the US.
> Crypto can be spendable cash. You can buy a coffee or a bar of gold with it, even bullets. Sounds like it can be used as a currency to me. It only takes a willing counterparty.
All true, but the same also applies to chickens, screwdrivers, oranges, dogs, cats etc. Just because you can barter with something doesn’t make it a currency.
Currencies are better identified by their fungibility (which crypto has), their value stability (which crypto currently doesn’t), and their wide acceptance for use in everyday transaction (also not true of crypto in the vast majority of the world).
> It's only from the perspective of someone that thinks like a loser, always trying to find something wrong, that you can find zero uses where using crypto is more energy efficient than other financial options. And not all cryptos use the same energy or transaction cost as others.
I’ll remind you of the guidelines, as you’ve clearly forgotten them.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Ad hominem attacks undermine your arguments and suggest that you don’t actually have very strong argument, instead you’re forced to attack the character of the person your discussing with, due to an inability to attack their argument. Try harder.
I used be a fan of crypto, did plenty of trading, bought plenty of pizza etc with it. When to meetups, evangelised crypto to friends and family. Back then it looked realistic that crypto could be a genuine currency, and the concept of DAG was incredibly.
Unfortunately crypto has descended into little more than get rich quick schemes that take advantage of naïve investors, or produce profit by externalising all of the negative consequences of crypto mining (such as CO2 emissions). Forcing the rest of us to bear that long term cost, for a grifters short term profit.
I admit there are coins out there that potential address these issues, and still possibly have a future as a genuinely useful currency. One not manipulated by a small number of extremely large coin holders. But unfortunately that doesn’t change the damage caused by other coins.
> For an example of transaction efficiency, I can buy a bar of gold from some established bullion vendors in litecoin much cheaper than with a visa card due to lower transaction risks for the merchant and lower transaction fees. If you can't wait multiple days for an ACH transaction and have to buy precious metals online, crypto is actually the cheapest way in the US.
This is just an example of how slow and backwards the US financial system is. Most other countries have far quicker and cheaper payment rails. Here in the U.K. I can send an instant Faster Payment for free from my bank account, and the money moves faster than the app UI (I get a push notification from the receiving bank, before the UI in my banks app has had time to display the confirmation). The whole of Europe has similar payment systems that also work cross border.
The money moves so fast that when trading crypto the slowest part of buying or selling was always the confirmations. The fiat part was instant.
>Ad hominem attacks undermine your arguments and suggest that you don’t actually have very strong argument, instead you’re forced to attack the character of the person your discussing with, due to an inability to attack their argument. Try harder.
I did attack your arguments, including many other points and I never called you a loser. Quit being so defensive. I said those who continually look for ways to make something not work, rather than finding the ways they do, think like losers. And I back that 100%! The only of the two of us who had made an ad hominem against the other is you, by saying I have an "inability to attack their (your) argument." Thanks hypocrite!
>Unfortunately crypto has descended into little more than get rich quick schemes that take advantage of naïve investors, or produce profit by externalising all of the negative consequences of crypto mining (such as CO2 emissions). Forcing the rest of us to bear that long term cost, for a grifters short term profit.
I'm not a fan of stable coins, but how many people you reckon are buying DAI or USDT with the idea of striking it rich? I hear this sad sad false diatribe over and over, completely ignoring that crypto-currencies are currencies and not investment, with people getting mad that crypto is not an investment that is going to provide returns for naive "investors." And then they go on to attack crypto for not living up to being an investment!
>I used be a fan of crypto, did plenty of trading, bought plenty of pizza etc with it. When to meetups, evangelised crypto to friends and family. Back then it looked realistic that crypto could be a genuine currency, and the concept of DAG was incredibly.
So you were a dogmatist for, and then apparently now a dogmatist against. Try being a neutral pragmatist that doesn't believe crypto is an investment utility but rather one possible financial engine that allows electronic transactions without KYC or centralized authority.
> The only of the two of us who had made an ad hominem against the other is you, by saying I have an "inability to attack their (your) argument." Thanks hypocrite!
Re-read my comment, that’s not what I said. It’s difficult to have a discussion with someone who selectively quotes text, and deliberately ignores the wider context.
> I'm not a fan of stable coins, but how many people you reckon are buying DAI or USDT with the idea of striking it rich?
One of the original stated goals of USDT was to provide an on-ramp to other crypto, and do an end run around KYC and AML laws. People don’t buy these coins to get rich, they buy them to either purchase other coins, or to temporarily insulate themselves from crypto volatility, without having to resort to fiat. Additionally the fundamentals to USDT have been called in to question may times, with plenty of evidence that whole things scam and someone’s stolen the backing fiat.
> Try being a neutral pragmatist that doesn't believe crypto is an investment utility but rather one possible financial engine that allows electronic transactions without KYC or centralized authority.
I’m not sure how you’ve ended up deciding that you think I treat crypto as an investment, not a currency, after I’ve explicitly said the opposite.
As I said I believed that crypto could be a very interesting and useful currency, unfortunately it’s not panned out that way. Saying we should treat crypto like a currency when it doesn’t behave like one, and when most people don’t treat it like one, is hardly pragmatic. A more pragmatic approach is to observe how others are using it, observe how it behaves, and treat it like that. If it looks like an value gaining asset, and people treat it like a value gaining asset, then it’s a value gaining asset. Not a currency.
To cover your eyes and ignore the reality of the situation is just foolish. It certainly does nothing to advance the cause of crypto being a currency.
Why are you wasting so many 'watts' sending this out? Every watt you use for debating on HN is a watt not used for something more productive. [ Personally I prefer units of energy like joule, power is not a measurement of wasted energy. If I wasted 10 kW for 1 minute it's not as bad as wasting 1 W for 11,000 minutes]
>If it looks like an value gaining asset, and people treat it like a value gaining asset, then it’s a value gaining asset. Not a currency.
>I’m not sure how you’ve ended up deciding that you think I treat crypto as an investment, not a currency, after I’ve explicitly said the opposite.
Again you go on contradicting yourself whenever you find it convenient. You are possibly the most disingenuous, contradictory, hypocritical person I've met on HN. Fine to waste 'watts' on social media news sites but not to send a payment to your unbanked cousin in El Salvador. Have fun thinking like a person who only looks for ways to fail, rather than ways to succeed.
Not a biblical person myself, but I'm going to take a note out of the bible on this one : " Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself."
One is not like the other. But please continue to pretend otherwise.
> Again you go on contradicting yourself whenever you find it convenient.
Please be explicit and show we’re I’ve contradicted myself. I don’t believe I have, but happy to be proven otherwise.
> Not a biblical person myself, but I'm going to take a note out of the bible on this one : " Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself."
You make a good point. Why have I bothered to talk to someone who is so clearly disconnected from reality.
It is a bit annoying that you assume that people critical of cryptocurrencies and specifically Bitcoin's environmental footprint are uneducated about the issues. It is not a myth. BTC's environmental footprint is preposterous. It's estimated that the network currently runs at 165 TWh/a, or around 19 GW, which means that one transaction uses around 5 GJ or 1500 kWh, and produces 800 kg of CO2, and 250 g of electronic waste.
For keeping track of a ledger that one dude in a basement with an Excel spreadsheet could keep track of, more or less.
Give me a break. Power consumption numbers are completely meaningless in this argument. Power usage does not correlate directly to CO2 emissions. Crypto can and does run on renewables. If we were serious about fixing climate change we'd stop all air traffic tomorrow. In reality, the climate issue is just a convenient political bludgeon.
Its not complicated. It is not necessary for crypto PoW to be powered by CO2 emitting fuels. It can be powered with renewables. Therefore the power usage of Bitcoin can't be used to infer its environmental impact. You need to know how much of that usage was on the back of fossil fuels.
> It is not necessary for crypto PoW to be powered by CO2 emitting fuels. It can be powered with renewables.
That's completely irrelevant for the correlation. Renewables are theta-bound by fossil fuels, and fossil fuels are theta-bound by renewables. Only at zero emissions for a source this would stop being true. This is first semester math.
> renewable power sources that operate in a closed zero emission fashion
If you mean operational emissions, then this is a trivial statement. If you mean total emissions, then this is a wrong statement, unless these people manufactured their own generators using zero emissions in the process.
Energy is fungible. Unless those renewable-generated watts were unable to be used for other things, then all marginal use of energy uses emitting sources, since we are not yet at 100% green energy. There are a few exceptions where mining is done on grids that are at 100% green energy, but this is not the norm.
Sure in theory. In reality not all energy is fungible because not all power generating systems in the world are connected. If I stand up a geo-thermal farm to run my crypto mining operation that power would not have been available to the grid anyway because the economic incentive to build the power station was crypto, not selling it to the grid.
These cases exist, but they are not the dominant form of mining. If all mining was done in such circumstances (and the energy source couldn't be connected to a useful grid) then people wouldn't be as upset.
If base load were to drop due to crypto miners being turned off, the energy with highest marginal cost would be turned off, which means fossil fuels, not renewables.
The fungibility argument doesn't work when you consider that not all power generation in the world is connected to the same grid. There are crypto operations that use their own renewable power infrastructure. That energy never would have made it to the grid because there was no incentive for it to be put there (otherwise it would already have been there). The incentive is to use it for crypto not your mom's blender.
> If we were serious about fixing climate change we'd stop all air traffic tomorrow.
The fashion industry alone has more climate impact than air traffic and maritime traffic together. Aviation contributes around 1% of air pollution (though 5% of greenhouse effect, due to high altitudes).
But all of those (transport, fashion) provide utility. BTC usurps nearly 1% of world electricity without providing commensurate discernible utility.
I'm sure people who don't fly or follow fashion feel the same way about the perceived utility.
I for one think not having to pay 20% for a remmitance for someone who is trying to help their famiy in another country has huge utility, maybe others disagree.
To underline how preposterous the whole PoW is - BTC is mined by hardware that consumes 2000-3000W each, all the while vast majority of these machines never mine a single block
Technically half true, they share the processing load of guessing the next valid block, and then share the profit when the one piece of hardware finally guessed it.
Those were the bad old days. There are pools now, like the old Seti@Home program. If your mining pool wins you get the percentage of the reward relative to the hashes you tried.
You can try to go it alone but your chances of finding the block reward are incomprehensibly low.
> For keeping track of a ledger that one dude in a basement with an Excel spreadsheet could keep track of, more or less.
No, for protecting against the untrustworthiness of that one guy in his basement. You may disagree with the value of that function, but that's what cryptocurrency provides.
> Measuring energy use per transactions makes no sense, as mining energy consumption is not related to the number of transactions processed.
Sure, measure energy use per amount of money transferred. That's not going to be very nice either.
> Also a huge portion of the energy used by bitcoin would otherwise be wasted.
Oh, come on. Now you're just trolling. It would have been used for something else that most likely wouldn't be waste, like in factories or in hospitals and such.
> Measuring energy use per transactions makes no sense
I am well aware of the difference between average and marginal energy use. This would be particularly relevant if the blocks were not full, but mined anyway, so that any additional transaction could've been included "for free". However, more often than not, that's not the case, but the mempool is non-empty, and the constraint (of max transactions per block) is binding. [1]
Thus, one can not trivially argue that the marginal cost of a transaction is zero.
Next, yes, my figures (165 TWh/a = 19 GW) from Digiconomist [2]) are at the upper end of the estimates, but other figures (eg Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index) estimate 100 TWh/a, with reasonable bounds of 36 to 376 TWh/a, so 12 to 28 GW, so are largely in alignment, modulo a factor of 2. (Note that your source is also within a factor of 3 of those estimates, pegging BTC at 0.2% of global electricity consumption.)
At any rate, the average cost is just preposterous, even if off by a factor of 3.
Oh, the old "EDuCaTE UrsElf" argument? I'm sorry, but Bitcoin's energy use doesn't even pass the smell test. If you're consuming ~1% of global power generation while providing only ~2% of world's narrow money, that's not very optimistic. The fact that its deflationary nature makes it unappealing for actual cash transactions should make it even worse should you go for transaction volume comparisons.
Yours is the top comment on this thread and it's a bit surprising. When you say less than 5%, what are you talk about? Can you point to any sources that back that up?
HN has a well known hatred for anything crypto. I’m not really sure why, to be honest. Very odd that an authoritarian action by an extremely centralized government is being applauded on here.
No, actually this has been a known thing for years. There have even been topics asking why HN hates crypto so much, which appear every six months or so.
I'm thinking the answer to such topics would be 'HN has large numbers of poster who are either smart and ethical, or smart, unethical, and not convinced the scam of crypto is safe to work on people for your personal gain'.
With China turning against bitcoin (regardless of their motivation), the latter category has even more reason to think cryptocurrency is a lousy way to fleece people for your personal gain. You don't have to be ethical to be against crypto, you can be a scammer yourself and simply be unsatisfied with the quality of the exploit being proposed.
"There is no future in this" is a fine reason to be against a thing even if you have no ethical qualms about exploiting people's foolishness. You have to be able to build a plausible case for why somebody ought to buy into it, and that just got observably harder.
I think a lot of people that like big government, people that tend to call themselves liberals, these people generally don't like (or even hate) crypto.
Maybe these people feel this way because they feel the government needs to protect people against themselves. Or maybe because they somehow fear central banks losing power and they feel central banks are needed in a monetary system. Or maybe they are concerned with the energy use for mining some crypto currencies (mainly Bitcoin).
On the other hand there's the libertarians that want as little government as possible. Libertarians tend to feel that people should be free to make their own choices as long as it doesn't harm other people. And that it's ok to make mistakes and learn from them and government doesn't need to protect people from mistakes.
I believe the tech sector has plenty of people on either side.
I myself am on the libertarian side and think crypto is a force of good. I do wonder if this crypto crackdown in China could somehow be related to the situation with Evergrande.
Even bad people can do good things. It's not strange at all that we can applaud an action of an authoritarian regime. Xi is an evil dictator, but I think this particular action is positive for the world.
> It's not strange at all that we can applaud an action of an authoritarian regime
But this is the authoritarian regime being authoritarian. HN isn't praising them doing something unusual, this is authoritarian China acting in its most normal manner. It wouldn't be surprising if Xi dictated this course of action either, although if he did I'm sure it was with support of China's wealthy elites.
> So authoritarian action is okay if it’s against bad things?
You're adding context that isn't really being discussed. If the discussion is 'Should we support actions by Xi, as an authoritarian, even if we agree with them?', then I'd say no. We shouldn't support actions by Authoritarian regimes.
That's not what discussed here. The discussion here is 'Is this action net positive or net negative?'. I believe it is net positive.
I can acknowledge the beneficial aspects of an action independent of it's executor. Bringing the executor into the conversation changes the topic. Think of it like discussing rocketry advancements in the 20th century. Nazis played a big role, but you can talk about how awesome rockets are without invoking them.
Because they didn't buy. And because they're very smart, there must have been a reason why they didn't buy, so they find one. So next time, next opportunity, they can't buy, or they would have been Wrong about it before.
Stop it! Break the cycle! Changing your mind says nothing bad about you. Let the past go, and think it through today, as if you saw it for the first time.
I think you're doing a disservice to the dissenting voices. Sure, some of it is probably jealousy due to missing out in MaSsSiVe GaInZ but I think there's a lot of room to say that something is a bad idea regardless of whether you have a stake in it.
I own some Bitcoin I mined myself in the early days. By luck or stupidity, I lost it for years and then found it in an old backup and now it is worth a number that would afford me a healthy retirement if I could get over my analysis paralysis. But I still think Bitcoin, as it embodies the idea of "crypto currency," is a terrible idea as a store of value, as an impact on our planet's environment, and as financial policy.
I feel the same way about housing policy (I own a house in Seattle), about transportation (I used to own two cars, but now none), about tax policy (I benefit greatly from Washington State having no income tax and relying mostly on flat-rate taxes that don't take up much of my income), and several more. Even though they're personally good for my family and me, they're terrible for the society at large and we have to live in a society so I'd like something better.
So, yeah, I think it's a bit reductive to distill the dissenting voices on HN down to "well, they didn't buy and hodl so they're just grouchy."
It's not whether they are useful for you, it's whether they are useful for anybody at all. If they did never and will never pay a dividend or have a buyback, then yes, they are a pyramid.
But it was just a matter of thinking a bit about it. Everybody knows what Bitcoin is useful for: cyber-extortion and evading capital restrictions. There are even good reasons for practicing the last one... With that in mind, BTC still behaves like a bubble, but proving it's actually one depends on a quite laborious process of comparing the volumes and estimating how they will evolve.
Crypto != Bitcoin. There’s a lot of exciting innovation happening in defi and other areas. The argument that crypto is only used for trading is well out of date
> The amount of people making a profit from it is less than 5%
I find it amusing how casually you just made up a statistic and used it as justification to ban something. Here's an actual statistic: 100% of people who held Bitcoin for longer than 4 years are up on their investment.
edit: Lots of downvotes for an easily verifiable fact. Anyone can look at the BTC chart and see that there is no 4 year span where the price ends up lower than it was at the start.
Nitpicking based on your definition of "investment" isn't really a dig at Bitcoin. I would argue that even fiat currencies are often used as investments to hedge against various types of risks. Bitcoin is not "supposed" to be anything, it's just a technology that has different uses for different people. Something that outperforms a majority of investments is certainly an investment to anyone who isn't gatekeeping.
95% is clearly a number pulled out of thin air, but it is likely that most people have not realized a profit from Bitcoin. Where would the money come from? The only way for a majority of investors to realize a (small) gain is for the minority to pay for it in a (larger) loss. And that's for a zero-sum game. In Bitcoin, since running the system involves continuously consuming real world value in the form of billions of dollars worth of energy per year, it's most likely that the majority of participants end up at a loss.
Just imagine everybody in the world buys as much Bitcoin as they can afford, immediately.
How much richer are we all, in aggregate, at the end of the day?
Madoff ran his scheme for decades. Till the day it fell apart 100% of his clients were up on their investments. They also learned that when you multiply decades of fantastic returns by a single zero your outcome is zero.
Millions can be wrong for decades. If history teaches anything is has to be this.
I am not fine with having every one of my transactions being 100% transparent to my government. Because that's the only alternative to Bitcoin^W cryptocurrency, given that real cash is on its deathbed for some reason. Bitcoin may very transparent, but other currencies like Monero are much better in that regard.
As to why >100% transparency is a desirable property, see recent regime changes and imagine how easy it would be to persecute the friends of the old regime by simply looking at their purchase history.
Huh? Bitcoin records every transaction you make on a public ledger that anyone in the world can view. Anyone who knows your wallet address can track your purchases
Bitcoin does, but it's not the only blockchain currency around. Some have more robust privacy guarantees. As far as I can tell, this rule in China bans those too.
I'm not saying I agree, but GP didn't say the converse - the framing was 'cash is going ['on its deathbed'], and I'm not happy with the mainstream replacements'.
Bitcoin wanted to be the world's currency, with a techno goldbug understanding of what money is. That shades a lot of what we think of as crypto.
There are a lot of different versions of the idea though. A lot of variety exists in crypto now, and very little is deterministic. I don't want to rule out the positive possibilities, and outlawing is broad brush. The PCB grunted at crypto here. We can do
That said, the variety of possibilities also creates danger. Underregulated stable coins, for example, get very sketchy once you reach a certain size. If they keep growing, start embellished with dolaralized interest payments and such.... you now have a rogue banking system issuing its own US dollars. Good luck with that. The scale of fraud, and treacherously borderline fraud can be epic. I don't think we should downplay these.
OTOH, this is true of every part of the financial sector. Lets not pretend the current way the financial sector is structured isn't riddled with the kinds of problems crypto poses.
A country with some clever CB people, even a small one, should be bold and bring crypto into the pax. There's a lot you can do with a designed-4-a-purpose currency, and crypto is a very viable way to do many things. Bitcoin's origins, and much of crypto's present, is secrecy oriented. But, it's actually more natural to design a cryptocurrency for transparency. That's useful in a lot of circumstances.
Take time to understand wtf is going on and regulate, ban or encourage specific things for specific reasons. There's a lot to be gained, not just a lot to be lost. A properly regulated stable coin might be a great idea.
Keynes has made a comeback during the pandemic, and people are relearning war era ideas about controlling inflation. In that context and considering 2021's low interest rates, national savings bonds will probably soon be considered in various places. You don't need crypto to do this, but it does give you more flexibility in how you do it.
> with a techno goldbug understanding of what money is
I think this isn't emphasized enough. With existing fiat money I have some degree of democratic control over monetary policy. With BTC, critical monetary policy was set by one person and if that monetary policy ever changes it will be decided by a combination of engineers and mining conglomerates.
Given how critical these policies are and how ideologically focused many of the non-speculators are, I am worried about growing systems with disastrous policy consequences.
I believe you lack understanding of BTC monetary policy. I'm 100% sure you don't think you do though.
BTC is at the point where if you don't have time or want to research what it really is, and only want to believe talking heads and authority figures, no one is going to take the time to explain it to you.
Those days are over, people have moved on and are using it for utility, without permission, how they see fit, whether as a currency or store of value.
Nothing can prevent a BTC transfer to anyone, anywhere, and at anytime. That is why China 'banned' it.
> I believe you lack understanding of BTC monetary policy.
I am so tired of people insisting that I simply don't know anything.
The mining curve is monetary policy. For example, a 100% premined coin has very different properties than a coin with a fixed mining rate and no upper bound. The upper bound on the number of bitcoins is consistently pointed at by proponents as a means to prevent inflation. I can imagine no other phrase for this than "monetary policy".
You claim you're tired of insisting you don't know anythig, yet you beleive you have no democratic say in BTC monetary policy. You don't know what you don't know.
I do not get a vote in BTC monetary policy by virtue of being a human. I'd get a vote according to my hash rate if I bought a mining rig. That isn't democracy.
The mining curve is reasonably described as monetary policy, seeing as it has a major impact on the distribution of coins and on inflation, which many crypto advocates worry about very deeply.
The mining curve was defined by Satoshi based on their original implementation. If there was to be a change in the mining curve we would need (1) a new version of the btc codebase that does mining rewards differently and (2) for the miners to swap to this fork. There is no mechanism for me, as a single person, to have a voice in this process except through contributing hash power to my preference. This is an amount of voting power associated with my wealth. That is antidemocratic.
Or do you want to just keep telling my that I am mysteriously ignorant over and over? That'll certainly endear people to the community.
That's not a vote on monetary policy. A vote on monetary policy is forking the algorithm and changing the nature of the cap.
Bitcoin and cryptocurrency es is a bunch of tech bros assuming they can run or set up a better monetary system than everyone else...
...without realizing that transaction media are an extremely powerful political and diplomatic tool, integral to maintaining national security, and will get stomped relatively quickly given enough time for governments to wrap their head around it.
You can fork the algorithm if you have a sustained >50% hash rate. I suspect that with BTC this will never happen in a meaningful way since something as basic as block sizes caused an insurmountable rift in the community.
I'm not a cryptophile, cryptobug or whatever crypto nuts are called, however I do like to see HN turning so extremely negative on crypto. A few years ago such negative sentiment about crypto was rare on HN, now it's common.
Why is that interesting? Because popular sentiment (in the comments) on HN is very frequently wrong. HN is a tremendous resource for contrarian purposes.
If you care so much about climate change have you completely stopped flying? Have you been in a car lately? The energy consumption from those activities is _beyond unacceptable_.
I don't fly in airplanes but I use crypto. So why should you get to choose to do some activities that blast CO2 directly into the atmosphere but I can't? It is a disgusting, authoritarian ideology you have.
Besides that crypto can run on solar. Airplanes cannot. So I propose we ban airplanes. /s
The reality is you just don't like the politics behind the crypto movement. The climate is just a convenient bludgeon for you.
Do you really want to ban holding 12 words in your head? Or maybe you meant private keys to remain legal but let's ban cryptographic signatures? What exactly do you want to make illegal?
The law works fine without needing to be fully general at the base level. This is the same "illegal number" problem that tech people like to worry about but which isn't actually a problem. The law can distinguish between a private key extracted from some system and an arbitrary pair of prime numbers just fine.
This is an american-centric view of the law; elsewhere in the world (including europe) judges don't reach silly decisions because a law was imperfectly drafted.
You probably live in the first world and had never to worry about inflation or politicians/bureaucrats just straight destroying the fiat currency and your wealth in the process. That's why crypto sounds so "wasteful" to you. BTW, if we give the government the power to judge what is a waste of energy and what's not, I can assure you life would be 100% more miserable, to everyone.
There's actual real fiat currencies for that. The USD, the EUR, the YEN, the CHF... plenty of choices that have been used for decades in the developing world. I'd much rather have my money in a stable-ish fiat currency like those than in some Bitcoin that goes up and down 10% at will or by Elon-tweet.
In fact some countries, e.g. Kosovo and Montenegro, in the Balkans, use the euro as a de facto domestic currency since 2002, even though they have no agreements with the EU.
Crypto"currencies" are not the only way to store value when an official currency is failing: people who want their savings preserved can get USD, EUR, gold.
Crypto *is* volatile and wasteful compared to any of those.
It is actually less harder than FIAT (except Monero), if you want to track spending of corrupt politicians, not fungible cryptocurrencies as BTC are great tools.
>Crypto as a tech to serve something different is totally fine of course.
Like what, NFTs for farts? Near as I can tell, the other main use cases for crypto - smart contracts, supply chain provenance tracking, and securities settlement processing really haven't panned out. Others have pointed out why it's not working as a currency. Literally all we have left is a vehicle for speculation.
All money is highly volatile, but the goverments and the military work hard to hide that. That's why we have the occasional bubble where banks lose everything we ever made.
What do you actually want Western nations to ban? The purchase and sale of digital currencies?? What if a nation adopts Bitcoin as its national currency? You can no longer buy and sell another nation's currency? What if you want to visit that country? (The what ifs will not end at these few examples.)
I don't clearly see what you would actually propose banning. My opinion is it's technology, an idea, and that shouldn't be banned.
First we should ban giftcards. I never understood the idea of using my versatile, national, currency to buy a restricted, local, currency. Esp. without getting a discount for the risk I take.
This is about the 19th time they do this since I follow the crypt news.
Its irrelevant, the people there are under the control of he CCP and no crypt could help them escape.
For those of you keeping track, this is about the 20th time China has declared to have banned Bitcoin or crypto. The only thing they've done is demonstrated that crypto is a threat to their all-reaching power grab and that they are mostly powerless to control it.
This is a country rounding up a whole population of a religious minority and sending them to reeducation camps. A country that mobilized over a billion people to almost completely control covid. You are vastly underestimating the CCP, as most Westerns continue to do.
I've noticed this quite a bit, and I don't understand it. People keep writing articles and saying things amounting to 'it just won't last forever'. But the reason is, because it just won't, totalitarian governments don't last.
Why wouldn't it? Strong central government. Clear economic and social goals with the ends justifying whatever unethical means. A complacent middle and upper class satiated by enough new wealth to make them fat(ter than they used to be) and happy.
Why won't they be the next world power for the foreseeable future? Is there an anti-party faction in China that's larger and more powerful than I see in US media?
Nothing wrong with the fundamentals of your argument, but growth can’t be unlimited. Eventually it’s starts slowing down, then those complacent middle class will start being less complacent and start demanding more freedom.
I think it’s reasonable to say the CCP will keep their grip on power for as long as they can continue delivering wealth to the middle class, and lifting those in poverty into the middle class. What’s not clear is how long the CCP can continue delivering that wealth.
The ongoing crisis with Everglade is showing that the CCP power and ability to generate wealth is not unlimited. I doubt it’s the beginning of the end, but it does shine a light on the long term structural flaws of their strategy. It’ll be interesting to see how the CCP deals with this over the next 10 to 20 years, maybe they’ll find a new strategy to maintain power, or maybe they’ll start a slow and gentle transition into democracy, allowing them to placate the middle class who won’t be seeing outsized wealth growth anymore.
That newly freedom-thirsty middle class could be simply brutally suppressed by an automated police force, powered by AI-driven surveillance. The CCP is a long-term thinking government, I'm sure they are at least considering how it would work.
Perhaps, but a brutally suppressed population doesn’t tend to be a very productive one.
Not saying it won’t happen, but I don’t think it’s a clear cut as you make it, and I think the CCP are smart enough to know that. They already do an astonishingly good job of treading the line between an authoritarian government that exploits it population for wealth, and one that empowers its populations for productivity and even greater wealth.
The problem comes from the fact that educated, wealthy middle classes are not fungible I'm the same way peasants are.
You can crush a thousand peasant farmers and replace them easily, you can't do that with the middle class without heavily setting back your economy and therefore being less competitive on the world stage.
The CCP will need to decide whether they want to release control and let their population produce value, or keep control and be unable to compete as a world power.
Considering the cultural revolution in China, the Siberian extermination camps of Soviet Russia, and the utterly bizarre treatment Imperial Britain had for petty criminals at the turn of the century, and the US Southern states fighting and dying for the right to enslave… I think that authoritarian governments would rather see tens if not hundreds of millions die before they ever lose their grip on power.
When things go poorly there is always an internal scapegoat, and knowing that no matter how low your situation is it’s (a) not your fault and (b) there is someone who has it worse is a great way to keep social cohesion through troublesome times. And if all else fails, one can find an external party and invade them as both a distraction and a way to deliver spoils to your loyalists.
I’d bet that things will get worse for ethnic and religious minorities in China during a downturn in the economy and if the economy continues to slowly slide for a decade then the neighbors of China like the Philippines will see more of their territory taken away.
> then those complacent middle class will start being less complacent and start demanding more freedom.
They will not start demanding more freedom (only a small minority will do that). They will become increasingly agitated and demand the kind of economic progress they had before, which the CCP won't be able to deliver (the easy, fast, low-debt growth has largely been saturated).
Specifically the CCP | people-of-China socioeconomic pact is based on the country continuing to deliver massive economic gains to the bulk of the population.
Xi has begun a new cultural revolution (just ahead of the curve) because he recognizes it's going to be required to stomp down on the population in order for the CCP to retain its position, as the easy economic gains are well over. The leadership of the CCP recognizes what's inevitable about their context: they either had to let go of power increasingly, or they have to become more totalitarian, as the growth pact begins to falter. What waits for China the next 30 years, is significant demographic erosion, slow growth and epic persistent debt problems (which doesn't mean they aren't going to be a superpower, they are).
In this vein, this is the United States' opportunity to out-compete China. We need to refactor immigration and foreign policy to embrace adding regions, refugees, and other migrants to our fold. Otherwise they will be added adhoc in overwhelming numbers and much to the surprise of government and the people. The world is getting hot. This causes unforseen changes like political upheaval and subsequent migrations (Hatian example recently).
The only answer might be adding other countries into our representative government system (not colonialism, but peacefully and equitably adding other willing states that want to benefit from stable government). Seems people are already voting to join with their feet. Embrace it.
I feel like North Korea shows that it's not just about growth. I would expect the CCP to hold power in the same way North Korea's dictator holds power even when the majority of the country is starving. Am I wrong?
I don’t think that it’s “a sure fire thing that it’ll collapse in N years” or anything, but I do have to wonder if a system that concentrates power that significantly would be less long-term stable, as all you need is one less-competent supreme leader to send the whole thing tumbling.
It's state propaganda. A (clever and very well designed) mix of known government actors and easily influenced third parties that work to push a specific narrative online. The thundering irony is that the west reports on such practices extensively when it comes to China, but the far more obvious actor (visible in the west) is your own government.
They have almost 0 community spread. A fact which many in the west respond to by saying that they’re faking their numbers, which completely ignores all of the counter measures they’ve taken. I have colleagues in China, and the Chinese lockdowns literally looked like a Zombie movie. It’s not surprising they were able to contain spread.
How dare China tries to stop jihadi networks in its country. One the Saudis, UAE, and the good ol CIA have every intention of using to destabilize China.
And you are choosing to ignore the most unsavory aspects that have been raised in the west because your local media has told you otherwise. Its absolutely true! There are very strong analogies here with Holocaust denialism, which some states see as such a problem they outlaw the philosophy!
It is not bigotry to stand up to authoritarianism and human rights abuses. You wield that term bigot to downplay the vast and monstrous human rights abuses occurring in Xinjiang.
Its absolutely nothing to do with race or nationality. There is nothing intrinsic that would permit such actions to be attributed to this. It is not about bigotry. Connecting the two is all part of the metagame in pushing a state propaganda. Make your accuser seem less credible so you never have to address the actual substance of the complaint.
The reported incidents include Forced Labor and Sexual Abuse, Organ Harvesting and Genocide. On mass. This happened. This is happening. There is plenty of neutral international sources on this. Saying it doesn't exist is absurd. There is clear evidence of this!
These are not lies told by the western media, as the Chinese media claims.
These are happening, they have been reported by people that have escaped, they have been raised to the UN. Most of the world has denounced this...
>And you are choosing to ignore the most unsavory aspects that have been raised in the west because your local media has told you otherwise.
I am in the west.
>Its absolutely true!
It absolutely is not.
>There are very strong analogies here with Holocaust denialism, which some states see as such a problem they outlaw the philosophy!
Yes agreed, people shilled for the Nazis just as you are now shilling for the modern day Nazis.
>It is not bigotry to stand up to authoritarianism and human rights abuses.
You are standing up for American authoritarianism and war mongering.
>You wield that term bigot to downplay the vast and monstrous human rights abuses occurring in Xinjiang. Its absolutely nothing to do with race or nationality. There is nothing intrinsic that would permit such actions to be attributed to this. It is not about bigotry. Connecting the two is all part of the metagame in pushing a state propaganda. Make your accuser seem less credible so you never have to address the actual substance of the complaint.
There are no human rights abuses happening in Xingjiang. It was all made up by Adrian Zenz. A mentally ill person who believes that he was chosen by god to rid the world of homosexuals and communists. You choose to believe this despite the overwhelming weight of evidence against it and the complete lack of any evidence for it. What is your excuse for this? You need to explain yourself. For me that answer is obvious, you are a sinophobic bigot.
>The reported incidents include Forced Labor and Sexual Abuse, Organ Harvesting and Genocide. On mass. This happened. This is happening. There is plenty of neutral international sources on this. Saying it doesn't exist is absurd. There is clear evidence of this!
All of the ridiculous claims have been robustly debunked, all of them, repeatedly. The only people left who repeat this absurd conspiracy are useful idiots for American imperialism and proud bigots.
Stop spreading "opinions" please. a whole population means basically you have inflated the inflated 1 millions to 7 or 8 millions people. Use your brain.
You're trying to say that because the Chinese Government has only detained an estimated million+ Uyghurs, it's completely fine because it wasn't literally all of them? You must realize that these flimsy efforts to defend the Chinese Government only makes it more obvious that the government is increasingly detached from the reality the rest of the world lives in, to the point where it says 2+2=5 and without irony believes it.
No, I am not. I am trying to say, stop making unreasonable accusations, regardless your motive. Media already publish only sensational headlines, at least, we, normal people, can behave better than them.
Because you believe you are righteous does not mean you can spread false information you can easily question with your brain, the same as you believe you are righteous does not mean you can go into other country for WMD.
They banned crypto mining before, but did they really ban crypto transactions before? This seems like the last step to make crypto coins 100% illegal in China.
What makes you think that? You do realise that they could easily outlaw 1) miners, 2) exchanges that convert to fiat, and 3) people privately exchanging to fiat, and (domestically) enforce that reasonably well, too.
And sure, there could still be an underground market - you can get still get weed and cocaine in China or Singapore, but I wouldn't recommend participating in it.
They literally did this already (miners were kicked out/shut down, the exchanges were shut down or put in line, and now the broad legality of simply owning/transferring them), and Bitcoin is still doing it's thing, more or less unphased (let's be real, a 10% dip is hardly remarkable in the crypto world) - demonstrating in technicolor how even the most empowered state, with far-reaching and unilateral control of every domain that cryptocurrency requires to operate (law, finance and telecommunication), is relatively useless in it's ability to hinder the mechanics of cryptocurrency. Driving it more underground will not squash it.
just kidding. I see 'crypto', I think 'cryptography', and China banning cryptography (except for the party/government) doesn't seem that far fetched, so I think its a bad headline.
Hah you brought a grin to my face. I fondly remember the late 90s when I was doing my BSc on computing. I was pretty into cryptography, stenography, data obfuscation and reverse engineering. Back then people doing "crypto" were called nerds by Software Engineers (the nerds of the nerds). Pretty great time.
If the Chinese Communist Party bans it, that’s good enough for me. They’re definitely making the kinds of changes and exerting power in a way that reassures me of their domestic and global aspirations.
For instance El Salvador made bit-coin legal tender there...
So china has out lawed what an other country has declared legal tender... Might make transactions between those 2 countries interesting....
It's not inconceivable that we could wind up in a period of hyperinflation where bitcoin (or some token) could be used to in a way similar to the Plano Real in Brasil back in the '90s. It could actually have a stabilizing (mostly psychological) effect, should things go haywire with fiat.
Other than white listing and black listing transactions by the miners and exchanges, and governments declaring it illegal, Bitcoin is 100% censorship resistant.
Serious question: In a place like China with the Great Firewall, can't they simply block crypto connections at the ISP level? Can't they more aggressively disallow VPN connections to locations outside of China? They might not be able to change the ledger but it seems like they could (will?) block access to them.
> A statement posted on the Central Bank’s website today says that “virtual currency does not have the same legal status as legal currency.”
China has "banned Bitcoin" dozens of times over the last decade. I mean, this is an ancient and well-known meme involving a certain South Park clip after all.
Maybe this time is for real, but all of these media announcements have one thing in common. They always conflate the concept of "legal tender" and "legality."
The number of authorities around the world who have warned citizens about Bitcoin using language like "no legal tender status" and "risky" and "no government guarantee" is legion. Easily thousands of times. Every time "journalists" with no business reporting on tech, law, or foreign governments interpret this as a "ban." 99% of the time, nothing happens and there is no ban.
So, maybe this time is different. Over the last year, an initiative toward greater centralized control seems to be underway in China's tech and finance sectors. Disappearing of wealthy founders. Restrictions on video game consumption. The three red lines. The ejection of the Chinese mining industry.
This seems like another step on a journey to maintain control over assets. So not the same thing as you have linked but nothing that should effect the market as China has been clear on its intentions.
I would be more curious about the larger game. A few front runner governments will establish there own ways to deal with crypto and then others will copy from a, b ,c. China's methodology is becoming more formal and therefore more copy able. I think we can already see the larger pattern and we already know who copies who traditionally... Would love to see a write up from this perspective.
This analysis suggests that the value of tracking every financial transaction will eventually cause governments to all want to institute there own crypto currencies and eventually outlaw independent crypto currencies.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 385 ms ] threadHowever I'm not entirely clear from the article exactly what the status of crypto in china now is. It's not clear to me from the quoted statement if it is actually illegal to use crypto to pay for something or to hold or transfer it, or if it's something a bit more subtle and limited.
There are A LOT scams going on with all coins, people put money into it without knowing anything about cryptocurrency. If you read recent news about Evergrande, when Chinese people invest money for speculation, no one is considering the risk of losing money. I wonder if this has something to do with this.
Its being hyped as "new" but its not.
Here's the one from 2021: http://www.safe.gov.cn/safe/2021/0924/19911.html
There are changes. E.g. the 2017 announcement doesn't mention 衍生品 (derivatives) at all, while the 2021 announcement explicitly lists trading them among the prohibited activities.
When will this be truly enforced?
I can't read the text and be certain whether it means that transactions in it are prohibited, or that it simply does not have the same status as legal tender, as in currency that companies are required to accept.
My market perspective:
"Everything is priced in."
Apparently, not in the crypto markets. Old news is new news, apparently.
Policy perspective:
The more DeFi becomes a thing, the less a policy like this will matter. It will still matter a lot, but it will pack less of a punch due to decentralized services.
My overall perspective:
If crypto still feels as speculative (in terms of trading crypto) 10 years later, then I feel the experiment to find a good use-case has ran for long enough.
Maybe I'm taking this to a place you didn't intend, or maybe this is an ignorant question but. . . .
What is the US market now, compared to 10 years ago. My experience is that 10 years ago Bitcoin was used to either buy drugs, or as a bet made by college kids that they could make easy money.
And. Well. It seems still pretty much the same in terms of existing primarily as a speculative tool.
And in all fairness, the speed at which you can send Ripple and similar cryptocurrencies is actually quite cool. It's a shame that it's mostly in its own little bubble still.
> Bitcoin was used to either buy drugs
In all fairness, I'm not necessarily against it. I'm not pro, but I do believe that many drug laws in most countries are against the idea of freedom. And I find it a comforting yet troubling thought (for different reasons) that cryptocurrencies fight against that (troubling: a 13 year old buying/using some very strong drugs, comforting: a 31 year old doing it for experimentation -- freedom is important).
As long as you can use something - be it a coin, a bill, a SWIFT transfer, a blockchain transaction or a Nuka-Cola bottle cap - to pay someone for something, and a third party would be able to identify it as a purchase, same things will happen. A criminal will be able to take your purchasing power and use it themselves. A taxman will be able to collect a percentage of your trade, and men with guns will take you in front of a judge if you refuse.
The manifestation of value doesn't matter, because money isn't a thing, it's a shared belief.
A blockchain based currency will exist as long as there's someone with a sufficiently powerful computing device connected to a sufficiently low-risk network that can be accessed legally or illicitly. A blockchain wallet will exist and be yours alone as long as you keep the password in your brain, never write it down, and resist attempts to extract it from you.
This means that, in comparison to conventional currency (including Nuka-Cola caps), a blockchain economy is much easier to operate undercover when it's outlawed.
> a system where TPTB get to fudge the books as they see fit
This depends on whether the media are in to the party or not but when they are this is mostly true.
> impose taxes via intentional inflation
This is a fact in those countries which have control over their own currency.
> and keep tabs on your every transaction
This is a fact and one of the driving forces behind the "cashless society".
2) The expansion of the money supply is not necessarily inflationary.
3) Inflation is very different from taxation: if you hold cash you’re supposed to circulate it, either by spending it or by investing it. Inflation disincentivizes cash-hoarding, and also deflated the value of any debt you might have.
2) ...but it generally is just that, inflationary. The fact that there can be exceptions to the rule does not make the rule less valid.
3) ...and inflation is also used by governments to provide funds (by "printing money" in some way or other, the actual implementation depends on how the currency is regulated) which otherwise would be provided through taxation, leading to inflation and as such reducing tax payer's purchasing power - just like taxation does.
2) it's not an exception to the rule at all. The rule for inflation doesn't mention how much money exists, it only mentions how much money circulates. More money existing does not necessarily mean more money circulating (eg.: money tends to concentrate in certain places for various reasons, rather than diffusing freely).
3) Sure, but two things that have similar features are not always similar in essence or nature. Swords and needles are both sharp, but you wouldn't argue that they're essentially the same. In fact in your own example, taxation for certain purposes could be either inflationary or deflationary (eg.: austerity measures, including those that involve taxation, are deflationary by design).
BTW the chip shortage has nothing todo with mining, but if you believe that lie Nvidia and AMD tells you since 5 years...well then that's to bad.
Needless to say that its also technically impossible to ban crypto. Its like banning torrents or even harder and we all know torrent was attacked heavily in the past but it did not go away.
Banning crypto in a practical sense is actually quite easy. Prohibit any business and any bank in dealing with them. If you cannot do legal transactions with e.g. Bitcoins any more, the market mostly dries up. It is not necessary to ban any single coin in existance, but its wide-scale usage in the normal economy.
By the way, there was never an attempt to ban torrents itself. That would have been reasonably easy on a protocol level. It was about banning illegal torrents. As in the content, not the protocol.
The hardcore crypto types would carry on using it but like 95% would give up - that's sufficient.
Another use is tax evasion and money laundering.
Why is crypto any better than cash if users are forced to deal in person? I understand the argument of not having to carry around a duffel bag that could be seized. But nations can disrupt crypto markets on a global scale.
At the very least, they can make it difficult to exchange for actual, usable, local currency. Which appears to be what China is poised to do.
Odds are that, given fiat to launder, or crypto that needs to be converted to fiat that still needs to be laundered, they would cut the useless step.
The only illegal industry that would still see the use for it is maybe ransomware, but ransomware is not a cyclic business, so it would be surprising that they'd find enough individuals on the street to convert their millions easily.
No one wants to ban crypto. The goal is to ban financial institutions that handle fiat from trading with institutions that handle crypto.
From there, if people want to accept funny money as payment for pizzas, it's up to them really.
All black markets have an incentive to use it - including state actors (e.g. weapons deals). Getting caught laundering Monero is preferable to getting caught selling missiles to the Saudis.
https://kotaku.com/ps4-crypto-warehouse-was-actually-farming...
Additionally, some individuals steal electricity (eg. from their workplace, or if they have electricity included in their rental contract). Cryptocurrencies have thus conveniently enabled a form of electricity theft and fraud previously impossible for the individual.
Steel manufacturing requires tons of electricity, and it is already impossible in EU without enormous subsidies. It's an industry surviving entirely on life support.
You can bribe enemy army staff with it.
But seriously, just how much is too much when it comes to steel subsidies, and just how much EU can tolerate its steel industry failing so hard to upgrade?
Rather than subsidising, say, buying new, more efficient blast furnaces EU countries basically just spend few hundred dollars extra of taxpayer money per ton of steel.
(Save the “it’s not really that bad” arguments, I’ve heard all the industry’s gaslighting, but their claims don’t match reality)
What you can do is use and support the climate friendlier alternatives. There are crypto currencies created with that in mimd
I am encouraged to see the transition to PoS and would love to see PoS overtake PoW, just from a bystander-concerned-about-the-environment perspective.
PoW by now is basically PoS with extra steps
But, even for the environment, I can't take people thinking it is a good idea govs using PoW, or standard exchange problems, to ban All crypto-currencies. While creating their own fake digital coin
PoS is also not ideal since it keeps promoting the same rules has the old system. Who has more money will keep having more independent if their producing something useful
So I think we still need something new, and someone smart to come up with it
Something that works for big groups, like a combination of localized PoW plus global PoS with PoT. Proof of trust, like most systems work
I don't agree with the sentiment of the parent either, but:
* Assume the best interpretation of a comment [1].
* Keep it on topic
* Don't attack the person, also not implicitly (e.g. "please educate yourself", don't say that)
Reread: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
One can claim many things about the parent comment. But it's all directed to the topic at hand.
Cheers!
[1] The best interpretation I can come up with is: yes the energy issue with crypto/bitcoin are an actual problem to solve. Yes, using crypto might be a good use-case in certain situations. While I don't believe the profit claim (there's no source), I can't disprove it either. So it poses an interesting question as to whether that's true.
One example being Algorand which is carbon neutral: https://www.algorand.com/resources/blog/how-algorand-offsets...
Oh and speaking of usage of crypto in China - i wonder how that affects VET / VeChain which is, largely, used by Walmart China to track their wares:
https://seevechain.com/contracts https://www.vechain.com/
Do you have any resources or studies to describe this more? I have really struggled to find actually nuanced discussions and unbiased sources for this. It’s all at the extremes of it’s either the worst thing ever to not a problem at all.
I’d also be interested in comparisons to energy usage of say servers that run Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc.
Interestingly enough, I had received an ad for this on my LinkedIn or Instagram before I ever clicked your link.
Additional studies [3] have shown that 39% of bitcoin miners are using renewables.
The energy consumption argument has led some to investigate the energy consumption of other assets such as gold with some estimating the energy requirements for gold to be 50x that of mining bitcoin [4].
Whenever energy consumption of other assets are pointed out to be higher than bitcoin the debate then shifts to utility; e.g it’s ok if Y consumes X energy because Y provides Z to society.
Some bitcoin miners are finding interesting way to utilize the heat produced by their mining equipment [5]. And some say that bitcoin mining can help reduce the cost of producing new green energy infrastructure since excess power that would’ve been wasted could be used for bitcoin mining to offset costs.
I agree with you that it is tough to find unbiased info on the subject.
- [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328581842_Bitcoin_e...
- [2] https://cbeci.org/
- [3] https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/2021-cc...
- [4] https://simon.medium.com/bitcoin-and-pollution-the-definitiv...
- [5] https://braiins.com/blog/green-innovation-in-bitcoin-mining-...
You make money when you exit and sell the asset for cash. Have they sold ?
When you can buy food, house/rent and the doctor accepts bitcoins it will become cash.
Probably because heads of state like to print it to solve their short term problems essentially robbing everyone with an inflation tax. I dont call that stable or just. I work and save and expect my currency to hold up and not be abused which is not happening currently.
Edit: HN must be the worst platform in existence to debate. I have about 700 karma and cant comment more than 3 times on this thread. Your rules are not helping discussion or clearing clutter, they're just really annoying. Retrac: no ive hit a limit and cant respond anymore on the whole thread even with only a few comments.
That's funny. The extant fiat currencies haven't failed. So, the only ones that have failed... are the failed ones. And those have failed, 100%, indeed.
Thus, not every currency has failed, although it could be argued that they still exist in a 'shadow' form, thus have not yet existed to the end of the infinite timeline.
Either way every failed currency has indeed failed, thus every currency in the future that fails will also be considered to be a failure, maintaining the 100% record for failure.
All of Europe's have. All of Asia's have. The Euro is too new.
Only the dollar arguably has endured the last 150 years, depending on how you consider its three redefinition with the foundation of the Fed system, then Bretton Woods and then with the abandonment of the gold standard..
I'm curious about what leads you to claim that gold is "a private currency". Can you elaborate on the rationale behind your claim?
Anyway. There's a cute video out there I can't find now of a man trying to use gold in New York to buy something. Anything. The results indicate its use as a currency was questionable. (No one would accept it as payment.)
Also, are you suggesting banning all assets whose volatility crosses a certain threshold?
As for energy consumption, does this also apply to Proof of Stake networks?
That's quite a polite way of saying "facilitate tax evasion".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCHab0dNnj4
How exactly do you think you could dethrone Bitcoin, overcoming its gigantic first-mover advantage?
I believe BTC could only come down with the rest of that "economy".
In practice this won't happen, because PoS coins don't deliver the same features (security, decentralization, permissionless) or the market doesn't believe they do.
Also the savings with PoS are not passed to the users of the cryptocurrency, but to the stakers, or big holders of the cryptocurrency. How do we even know, that these people will spend the money they make using some more enviromentally friendly way? Maybe they just buy lambos with the money and fly around with private jets.
Mining is quite small amount of the total transacted amount of BTC daily, and people are willing to pay the cost. If you want to replace Bitcoin with some more enviromentally friendly thing, you have to offer the same capabilities (or better). PoS coins fail to deliver this.
>and people are willing to pay the cost.
No they are not. BTC runs on the block reward not on the fees. Without block reward the average Tx fee would be like 150 USD. (Not accounting for the fact that this would significantly drop the number of Tx which would then raise the cost for the rest of the transaction even higher.)
It's been what, 2 or 3 years since decent PoS designs were introduced to the market? The crypto market is still trying to tell the difference between their right foot and a private key. Give it a few more years and eventually the market will settle convincingly on a design it values the most, be it PoW, PoS, or something else.
In the mean time, it's silly imo to say that the market has decided. The crypto space is still a volatile bloodbath of old chains dying and new competitors rising.
Side-chains dont solve the problem no matter how many and how performant they are. On the main-chain the fees need to eventually cover the cost of running the network i.e. the whole energy, hardware and human labor. Currently this is still mostly paid by the block reward (aka paid by inflation). This pays about a quarter million USD every 10 minutes. It doesn't need much common sense to figure out that if the combined fees of all peoples transaction need to result in a quarter million USD every 10 minute then transaction can not be cheap. Bitcoin is currently running on subsidy by its own block reward that pays about as much as google pays for operation.
The average Tx fee is currently a few dollar but a subsidy of about 140 dollar is added form the block reward. Non-PoW based systems have outperformed bitcoin in terms of transaction for years with average Tx fees of less than a cent. Shouldn't this be enough incentivize? Surely it is for thous who actuality want to use the system. The gamblers and maxis will probably hodl their bag forever but once it loses market relevant it will sharply become insecure as well and the whole thing should collapse. Might take another 10 years, who knows but it eventually has to fail. Its like ICE cars vs. EVs it was always just a matter of time but it felt like it took forever.
>How exactly do you think you could dethrone Bitcoin, overcoming its gigantic first-mover advantage?
If you look at the bigger picture BTC loses market share and there is no sign that this will change. The gains are below average so people who only gamble have an incentive to gamble with something else.
That reads like a tautology—they're called "the rich" because they have wealth, so naturally if you look at the distribution of assets most will be in the hands of the rich. One doesn't accumulate assets purely by being rich, however, as many a lottery winner can attest. Barring the occasional (and usually short-lived) windfall, for the most part those who attain wealth do so because they possess certain habits and preferences related to saving and investing. Even if you reset the distribution of wealth those tendencies would remain and bring about a gradual return to the original economic structure.
Crypto's, especially Bitcoin, are too enshrined in the financial world to be banned in the West.
This thing also poses a real threat to SWIFT and anyone trying to put together a successor to SWIFT. The US has been weaponising international currency transfers for a while now, and China would be facing problems controlling capital flows if people could just send money internationally without much consequence. There are good, selfish, reasons for why governments would intervene.
Why would any sane person invest in real estate? You have maintenance costs, property taxes, it's not liquid and you can go years with little growth. Not to mention if your area see's hard economic times (i.e. Detroit), the chance of a rebound is slim.
You also ignore the premise being put forth, that Bitcoin as a currency still isn't ideal. You don't think "long term investment" with currency so much as short to medium term. Like, will bread and milk cost 10x as much next week?
"Stop thinking investment and start thinking survival" might be a good way to put it.
Nassim Taleb disagrees: https://youtu.be/dLOeBSaq-Ps
I bet the CoinGeek conference audience were stunned by his keynote talk because Taleb used to be a supporter.
At the same time, hedging against inflation is hard. The things you suggested come with their own risks.
I think a future in which crypto becomes stable due increased adoption is possible, and in that future it will be a good hedge.
Does that logic applies in China? Are real state or equities a protection from volatility on a self proclaimed communist country? What about South America, Lebanon or Turkey?
The incontestable precious and invaluable wisdom of the hacker news poster who potentially lives on US California or some rich western country on a comfortably fat salary.
Every. single. time.
The CCP is a bunch of unambitious individuals. Everything that causes troubles to the CCP means troubles for Xi and the possibility that his "president for life" title might be revoked, creating room for somebody else to ascend.
From a game theory standpoint it is better to be at the helm of a slightly less relevant organization than being a subordinate of an organization plowing ahead at full steam unrivaled.
This is even more true in politics and NGOs where the monetary compensation is very limited and it's all about the status.
The reason why we have inflation and debt is to keep the value of our currencies stable. IE, if people want to use dollars, the US government can print more dollars to satisfy the demand. (And thus keep the value stable.)
Cryptocurrency's volatile value is a result of its inability to "print money" when more people want to use it.
Remember: Currency is not an investment. A good currency has a stable value over time; otherwise it's very difficult to conduct commerce.
I'm not following. By definition, inflation is what happens when the price of a currency is not stable.
> Remember: Currency is not an investment. A good currency has a stable value over time; otherwise it's very difficult to conduct commerce
Agreed. But in countries with high inflation, such as mine, you will lose money if all your wealth is stored as fiat.
Even fairly high inflation levels of say 7% annually can still be quite stable on a daily or monthly basis which is all you really need. As most people spend most of their paycheck every month and savings aren’t limited to the currency in question.
By comparison crypto coins tend to have much higher daily and monthly variations which isn’t a big deal for savings, but in practice it discourages their use for day to day expenses.
Even without knowing what country you are from, I would bet that inflation is because imports and exports imbalances and nothing to do with "printing too much money".
And anyway, if the problem is storing value, why you don't buy gold or dollars, yens or something like that?
Those are the traditional means and are usually banned or strongly regulated, if the states money is at stake.
That kind of stability is more beneficial to the middle class than any negatives that may come with that level of inflation.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/02/business/australia-recess...
And if you're going to break the guidelines and comment on voting anyway, the very least that you could do is also add some value to the discussion, e.g. add some thoughts/elaboration/support for the points made.
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Australia has gone 30 years without recession because we're supplying commodities like iron into the most miraculously productive miracle in all of recorded history, aka mainland China. And because we've got one of the highest rates of net migration in the developed world.
On a per capita basis Australia has had recessions, and it is a stretch to say that our inflation target did anything relative to all the other countries that have inflation targets.
However, bitcoin experiences 10-20% drops against the USD on a regular basis. It looks like this announcement has triggered another one. It's not stable, it's just (a) appreciated over time a lot and (b) is doing better against the USD than, say, the Argentine peso.
> By definition, inflation is what happens when the price of a currency is not stable
Inflation is what happens when the price of goods and services in a currency is not stable. It can be triggered without a change in the money supply by underlying shocks to the real economy (e.g. 70s oil shocks)
Bitcoin claims to guarantee money supply stability, but it cannot guarantee price stability.
That's also the case in countries with low inflation. That's why, in the US, wealthy people don't stuff cash in mattresses, or keep most of their wealth in general bank accounts. They buy stocks, bonds, real estate, ect. This is also why, in the US, investment vehicles like 401ks and IRAs are highly encouraged.
A stable currency would have an inflation rate of 0%. Inflation does not cause currency stability, it decreases the value of the currency.
By definition, its value is changing.
Sure, and if the government had centralized control of all prices, it could mandate that. Since it doesn't (even those that assert that power don't have it in practice), what it seeks to do, as far as stability, is try to acheive low short-term price volatility, and as it turns out, experience shows that low-to-moderate inflation helps with that.
The M1 isn't the measure that matters - but it is a fact that large amounts of money are appearing from somewhere and that is probably the most significant factor in the currency losing value. Price controls are an overreaction, there are easier ways to make the currency more stable.
[0] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/money-supply-m1
No it doesn't. M1 also includes demand deposit accounts (checking and savings accounts), among other things that aren't physical currency.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/m1.asp
The USD is one of the most stable currencies in the world.
Perhaps that is why countries like Japan are changing the definition of crypto and calling it "virtual assets" instead of "virtual currency".
Bailouts are another benefit. Governments can at will dull or even prevent financial contagion thus preventing another Great Depression.
All this has a cost in the form of inflation until the money is reabsorbed of course but it’s better than economic collapse.
The burden of the proof always lies with the person or the entity trying to sell something.
The government failed to sell QE and bailouts to the population, the government further failed to sell inflation target at 2% to the population.
Had government not failed in selling these concepts we'd not have bitcoin.
Government as always can't sell. Otherwise it won't be government.
I recall a recent vote where someone was elected president by a significant majority running on just this platform.
In any event even if this was true an ambitious organization such as the government can't be satisfied with 52% confidence in its financial planning
As a democracy, there's no alternative to the government working with whatever majority it gets.
The government managed to sell the need for the military industrial complex.
The military is the most popular branch of the Federal Governemnt whereas the Fed and Treasury linger at 50-60% depending on who is in the WH.
50-60% is very low, that's the reason why Bitcoin thrives. If that number was 92-95% then Bitcoin would not exist.
Is it possible to have that number at 92-95% ? Maybe, maybe not...in any event the answer is not attacking bitcoin because even if Bitcoin is destroyed that remaining 50% void will be filled pretty quickly by something else.
In fact the the US government actually made money from the bailout.
> In total, U.S. government economic bailouts related to the global financial crisis had federal outflows (expenditures, loans, and investments) of $633.6 billion and inflows (funds returned to the Treasury as interest, dividends, fees, or stock warrant repurchases) of $754.8 billion, for a net profit of $121 billion.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program#...
If you are an organization with 6000 nukes, 22T GDP, largest navy and airforce you don't get to cry about "misinformation".
People don't like QE and bailouts. Period. The burden of the proof is always on the person/organization trying to sell something. Always. For sure the public didn't conceive QE or bailouts and didn't try to sell it to the government.
Bitcoin would not exist if QE and bailouts were marketed by master salesmen such as Steve Jobs, Dana White, Don King or David Geffen
We as investors should operate with what is perceived by the population, not textbooks.
Perceptions move the market, and in the case of Bitcoin perception created a market. From 0 to 2 trillions in 10 years.
It’s not like the banks didn’t suffer during 2008. That bailout money was mostly returned with interest. All the government did was extend a lifeline.
Every watt of renewable power generated to power a crypto miner, is a watt not being used to reduce the use of non-renewables in the wider energy grid.
I don’t care if your crypto gear is hooked up to a dedicated hydro plant, I care that the hydroplant is not connected to the wider grid and shutting down gas fired power stations.
Yes, that is true...
> which he would rather was not invested in renewable energy
...no, he would have used the generated electricity for something more useful, NOT make it so that it isn't generated in the first place.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/09/old-coal-plant-i...
Its not unique either. There’s a company in the U.K. that bought an old coal plant, to convert to gas operators, to provide power solely for a crypto mining operation.
Simple fact of the matter is that it currently cheaper and easier for miners to use fossil fuels, then build renewables. Which is exactly what they’re doing.
No, he's not.
> meanwhile his plan crashes the price of renewable energy endangering those industries and shrinking the market.. allowing established fossil fuel industries a bigger share
It seems that you have completely missed the past four decades of renewable energy decreasing in price by a factor of 100x. The result of this decrease was not "endangering those industries", but rather making them viable in the first place and broadening the market massively. As per Jevons, the energy market doesn't shrink when prices get lower.
I'm puzzled as to how someone could make such a glaringly obvious mistake.
And it seems you have completely missed the fact that investment from crypto miners helped to bring this efficiency saving about, if there wasn't so much demand, there would be nothing to invest in R&D and infrastructure that inevitably lower prices.
Crypto, or specifically PoW acts like a guarantee of sale under a certain price per KwH. It used to be necessary for governments to guarantee power prices, and offer subsidies to encourage investment in their countries infrastructure. PoW in part replaces this necessity and encourages companies to invest in renewable, efficient, power production.
Btw. we have truck driver and plumber shortages.
Bitcoin makes use of energy that would otherwise be unused.
All that means is that in almost all scenarios bitcoin mining will be directly causing an increase usage of non-renewable energy. There are of course certain times and places where this doesn’t hold true and there’s a genuine surplus of renewable power that can’t be stored. But that’s an exception not the rule. Try and tell me with a straight face that the majority of power consumed by crypto is surplus renewable energy.
Only from the view of the universe, not from the view of humans. It cost less energy to drill for oil than the energy you get out of the gasoline. It takes less energy to create a solar panel than what you can get out of it. It takes less energy to labor at the factory for an hour than the energy you get from the 150KwH of power you can buy for your house from that hour of motion you performed at the factory.
If I use some electricity to run PoW on an electronic litecoin transaction from me to my friend in Kenya, that's a hell of a lot lower energy than building and operating a Western Union in Kenya isn't it?
On an aggregated pre transaction basis we know this isn’t true. Crypto is not more energy efficient than existing financial infrastructure. Additionally you’re comparing a small part of a financial transactions (I.e. and database update) to a complete end-to-end transaction, including turning those digital funds into spendable cash.
Unless you friend in Kenya is also capable of spending that crypto, without turning it into fiat, then example is meaningless, because your ignoring all the infrastructure need to do that fiat conversion.
Additionally Kenya has digital banking infrastructure. Send a SEPA payment instead, no need to Western Union.
Crypto can be spendable cash. You can buy a coffee or a bar of gold with it, even bullets. Sounds like it can be used as a currency to me. It only takes a willing counterparty.
> Crypto is not more energy efficient than existing financial infrastructure.
That depends on the place and circumstance. I concede that Kenya was a poor example and I should have used someplace like Central African Republic instead.
>Additionally Kenya has digital banking infrastructure. Send a SEPA payment instead, no need to Western Union.
Assuming you are one of the one third of Kenyans who have a bank account. And assuming the one sending the money has a bank account. Both of which involve documentation and KYC, something not necessary in most crypto transactions.
>because your ignoring all the infrastructure need to do that fiat conversion
Not really, crypto to fiat can be done informally. There's several people in my city who buy and sell it and all they need is a cellphone and local currency.
It's only from the perspective of someone that thinks like a loser, always trying to find something wrong, that you can find zero uses where using crypto is more energy efficient than other financial options. And not all cryptos use the same energy or transaction cost as others.
For an example of transaction efficiency, I can buy a bar of gold from some established bullion vendors in litecoin much cheaper than with a visa card due to lower transaction risks for the merchant and lower transaction fees. If you can't wait multiple days for an ACH transaction and have to buy precious metals online, crypto is actually the cheapest way in the US.
All true, but the same also applies to chickens, screwdrivers, oranges, dogs, cats etc. Just because you can barter with something doesn’t make it a currency.
Currencies are better identified by their fungibility (which crypto has), their value stability (which crypto currently doesn’t), and their wide acceptance for use in everyday transaction (also not true of crypto in the vast majority of the world).
> It's only from the perspective of someone that thinks like a loser, always trying to find something wrong, that you can find zero uses where using crypto is more energy efficient than other financial options. And not all cryptos use the same energy or transaction cost as others.
I’ll remind you of the guidelines, as you’ve clearly forgotten them.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Ad hominem attacks undermine your arguments and suggest that you don’t actually have very strong argument, instead you’re forced to attack the character of the person your discussing with, due to an inability to attack their argument. Try harder.
I used be a fan of crypto, did plenty of trading, bought plenty of pizza etc with it. When to meetups, evangelised crypto to friends and family. Back then it looked realistic that crypto could be a genuine currency, and the concept of DAG was incredibly.
Unfortunately crypto has descended into little more than get rich quick schemes that take advantage of naïve investors, or produce profit by externalising all of the negative consequences of crypto mining (such as CO2 emissions). Forcing the rest of us to bear that long term cost, for a grifters short term profit.
I admit there are coins out there that potential address these issues, and still possibly have a future as a genuinely useful currency. One not manipulated by a small number of extremely large coin holders. But unfortunately that doesn’t change the damage caused by other coins.
> For an example of transaction efficiency, I can buy a bar of gold from some established bullion vendors in litecoin much cheaper than with a visa card due to lower transaction risks for the merchant and lower transaction fees. If you can't wait multiple days for an ACH transaction and have to buy precious metals online, crypto is actually the cheapest way in the US.
This is just an example of how slow and backwards the US financial system is. Most other countries have far quicker and cheaper payment rails. Here in the U.K. I can send an instant Faster Payment for free from my bank account, and the money moves faster than the app UI (I get a push notification from the receiving bank, before the UI in my banks app has had time to display the confirmation). The whole of Europe has similar payment systems that also work cross border.
The money moves so fast that when trading crypto the slowest part of buying or selling was always the confirmations. The fiat part was instant.
I did attack your arguments, including many other points and I never called you a loser. Quit being so defensive. I said those who continually look for ways to make something not work, rather than finding the ways they do, think like losers. And I back that 100%! The only of the two of us who had made an ad hominem against the other is you, by saying I have an "inability to attack their (your) argument." Thanks hypocrite!
>Unfortunately crypto has descended into little more than get rich quick schemes that take advantage of naïve investors, or produce profit by externalising all of the negative consequences of crypto mining (such as CO2 emissions). Forcing the rest of us to bear that long term cost, for a grifters short term profit.
I'm not a fan of stable coins, but how many people you reckon are buying DAI or USDT with the idea of striking it rich? I hear this sad sad false diatribe over and over, completely ignoring that crypto-currencies are currencies and not investment, with people getting mad that crypto is not an investment that is going to provide returns for naive "investors." And then they go on to attack crypto for not living up to being an investment!
>I used be a fan of crypto, did plenty of trading, bought plenty of pizza etc with it. When to meetups, evangelised crypto to friends and family. Back then it looked realistic that crypto could be a genuine currency, and the concept of DAG was incredibly.
So you were a dogmatist for, and then apparently now a dogmatist against. Try being a neutral pragmatist that doesn't believe crypto is an investment utility but rather one possible financial engine that allows electronic transactions without KYC or centralized authority.
Re-read my comment, that’s not what I said. It’s difficult to have a discussion with someone who selectively quotes text, and deliberately ignores the wider context.
> I'm not a fan of stable coins, but how many people you reckon are buying DAI or USDT with the idea of striking it rich?
One of the original stated goals of USDT was to provide an on-ramp to other crypto, and do an end run around KYC and AML laws. People don’t buy these coins to get rich, they buy them to either purchase other coins, or to temporarily insulate themselves from crypto volatility, without having to resort to fiat. Additionally the fundamentals to USDT have been called in to question may times, with plenty of evidence that whole things scam and someone’s stolen the backing fiat.
> Try being a neutral pragmatist that doesn't believe crypto is an investment utility but rather one possible financial engine that allows electronic transactions without KYC or centralized authority.
I’m not sure how you’ve ended up deciding that you think I treat crypto as an investment, not a currency, after I’ve explicitly said the opposite.
As I said I believed that crypto could be a very interesting and useful currency, unfortunately it’s not panned out that way. Saying we should treat crypto like a currency when it doesn’t behave like one, and when most people don’t treat it like one, is hardly pragmatic. A more pragmatic approach is to observe how others are using it, observe how it behaves, and treat it like that. If it looks like an value gaining asset, and people treat it like a value gaining asset, then it’s a value gaining asset. Not a currency.
To cover your eyes and ignore the reality of the situation is just foolish. It certainly does nothing to advance the cause of crypto being a currency.
>If it looks like an value gaining asset, and people treat it like a value gaining asset, then it’s a value gaining asset. Not a currency.
>I’m not sure how you’ve ended up deciding that you think I treat crypto as an investment, not a currency, after I’ve explicitly said the opposite.
Again you go on contradicting yourself whenever you find it convenient. You are possibly the most disingenuous, contradictory, hypocritical person I've met on HN. Fine to waste 'watts' on social media news sites but not to send a payment to your unbanked cousin in El Salvador. Have fun thinking like a person who only looks for ways to fail, rather than ways to succeed.
Not a biblical person myself, but I'm going to take a note out of the bible on this one : " Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself."
Have a good one.
One comment on HN, probably around 100mWh.
One is not like the other. But please continue to pretend otherwise.
> Again you go on contradicting yourself whenever you find it convenient.
Please be explicit and show we’re I’ve contradicted myself. I don’t believe I have, but happy to be proven otherwise.
> Not a biblical person myself, but I'm going to take a note out of the bible on this one : " Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself."
You make a good point. Why have I bothered to talk to someone who is so clearly disconnected from reality.
For keeping track of a ledger that one dude in a basement with an Excel spreadsheet could keep track of, more or less.
That's completely irrelevant for the correlation. Renewables are theta-bound by fossil fuels, and fossil fuels are theta-bound by renewables. Only at zero emissions for a source this would stop being true. This is first semester math.
There are plenty of crypto operations that have their own, renewable power sources that operate in a closed zero emission fashion.
If you mean operational emissions, then this is a trivial statement. If you mean total emissions, then this is a wrong statement, unless these people manufactured their own generators using zero emissions in the process.
If base load were to drop due to crypto miners being turned off, the energy with highest marginal cost would be turned off, which means fossil fuels, not renewables.
Energy is fungible.
> If we were serious about fixing climate change we'd stop all air traffic tomorrow.
The fashion industry alone has more climate impact than air traffic and maritime traffic together. Aviation contributes around 1% of air pollution (though 5% of greenhouse effect, due to high altitudes).
But all of those (transport, fashion) provide utility. BTC usurps nearly 1% of world electricity without providing commensurate discernible utility.
I for one think not having to pay 20% for a remmitance for someone who is trying to help their famiy in another country has huge utility, maybe others disagree.
Network shares the load but winner takes it all, i thought.
You can try to go it alone but your chances of finding the block reward are incomprehensibly low.
No, for protecting against the untrustworthiness of that one guy in his basement. You may disagree with the value of that function, but that's what cryptocurrency provides.
Also a huge portion of the energy used by bitcoin would otherwise be wasted.
Also your figures are egregiously off and taken from flawed estimates
https://nydig.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/NYDIG-Bitcoin-N...
Sure, measure energy use per amount of money transferred. That's not going to be very nice either.
> Also a huge portion of the energy used by bitcoin would otherwise be wasted.
Oh, come on. Now you're just trolling. It would have been used for something else that most likely wouldn't be waste, like in factories or in hospitals and such.
I am well aware of the difference between average and marginal energy use. This would be particularly relevant if the blocks were not full, but mined anyway, so that any additional transaction could've been included "for free". However, more often than not, that's not the case, but the mempool is non-empty, and the constraint (of max transactions per block) is binding. [1]
Thus, one can not trivially argue that the marginal cost of a transaction is zero.
Next, yes, my figures (165 TWh/a = 19 GW) from Digiconomist [2]) are at the upper end of the estimates, but other figures (eg Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index) estimate 100 TWh/a, with reasonable bounds of 36 to 376 TWh/a, so 12 to 28 GW, so are largely in alignment, modulo a factor of 2. (Note that your source is also within a factor of 3 of those estimates, pegging BTC at 0.2% of global electricity consumption.)
At any rate, the average cost is just preposterous, even if off by a factor of 3.
[1] see for example https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,1w,count
[2] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
[3] https://cbeci.org
With China turning against bitcoin (regardless of their motivation), the latter category has even more reason to think cryptocurrency is a lousy way to fleece people for your personal gain. You don't have to be ethical to be against crypto, you can be a scammer yourself and simply be unsatisfied with the quality of the exploit being proposed.
"There is no future in this" is a fine reason to be against a thing even if you have no ethical qualms about exploiting people's foolishness. You have to be able to build a plausible case for why somebody ought to buy into it, and that just got observably harder.
Maybe these people feel this way because they feel the government needs to protect people against themselves. Or maybe because they somehow fear central banks losing power and they feel central banks are needed in a monetary system. Or maybe they are concerned with the energy use for mining some crypto currencies (mainly Bitcoin).
On the other hand there's the libertarians that want as little government as possible. Libertarians tend to feel that people should be free to make their own choices as long as it doesn't harm other people. And that it's ok to make mistakes and learn from them and government doesn't need to protect people from mistakes.
I believe the tech sector has plenty of people on either side.
I myself am on the libertarian side and think crypto is a force of good. I do wonder if this crypto crackdown in China could somehow be related to the situation with Evergrande.
[0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-road-from-liber...
But this is the authoritarian regime being authoritarian. HN isn't praising them doing something unusual, this is authoritarian China acting in its most normal manner. It wouldn't be surprising if Xi dictated this course of action either, although if he did I'm sure it was with support of China's wealthy elites.
We are in for a scary future, enabled by the attitudes in this thread.
You're adding context that isn't really being discussed. If the discussion is 'Should we support actions by Xi, as an authoritarian, even if we agree with them?', then I'd say no. We shouldn't support actions by Authoritarian regimes.
That's not what discussed here. The discussion here is 'Is this action net positive or net negative?'. I believe it is net positive.
I can acknowledge the beneficial aspects of an action independent of it's executor. Bringing the executor into the conversation changes the topic. Think of it like discussing rocketry advancements in the 20th century. Nazis played a big role, but you can talk about how awesome rockets are without invoking them.
Stop it! Break the cycle! Changing your mind says nothing bad about you. Let the past go, and think it through today, as if you saw it for the first time.
I own some Bitcoin I mined myself in the early days. By luck or stupidity, I lost it for years and then found it in an old backup and now it is worth a number that would afford me a healthy retirement if I could get over my analysis paralysis. But I still think Bitcoin, as it embodies the idea of "crypto currency," is a terrible idea as a store of value, as an impact on our planet's environment, and as financial policy.
I feel the same way about housing policy (I own a house in Seattle), about transportation (I used to own two cars, but now none), about tax policy (I benefit greatly from Washington State having no income tax and relying mostly on flat-rate taxes that don't take up much of my income), and several more. Even though they're personally good for my family and me, they're terrible for the society at large and we have to live in a society so I'd like something better.
So, yeah, I think it's a bit reductive to distill the dissenting voices on HN down to "well, they didn't buy and hodl so they're just grouchy."
However, as an investment, as of right now, there is only a span of a few months where if you bought Bitcoin you would not be in the green right now.
Did people find a useful reason to buy Bitcoin already? Something that creates value, instead of hopping to sell higher for the next sucker?
But it was just a matter of thinking a bit about it. Everybody knows what Bitcoin is useful for: cyber-extortion and evading capital restrictions. There are even good reasons for practicing the last one... With that in mind, BTC still behaves like a bubble, but proving it's actually one depends on a quite laborious process of comparing the volumes and estimating how they will evolve.
I find it amusing how casually you just made up a statistic and used it as justification to ban something. Here's an actual statistic: 100% of people who held Bitcoin for longer than 4 years are up on their investment.
edit: Lots of downvotes for an easily verifiable fact. Anyone can look at the BTC chart and see that there is no 4 year span where the price ends up lower than it was at the start.
Just imagine everybody in the world buys as much Bitcoin as they can afford, immediately.
How much richer are we all, in aggregate, at the end of the day?
Millions can be wrong for decades. If history teaches anything is has to be this.
As to why >100% transparency is a desirable property, see recent regime changes and imagine how easy it would be to persecute the friends of the old regime by simply looking at their purchase history.
Edit:
There are a lot of different versions of the idea though. A lot of variety exists in crypto now, and very little is deterministic. I don't want to rule out the positive possibilities, and outlawing is broad brush. The PCB grunted at crypto here. We can do
That said, the variety of possibilities also creates danger. Underregulated stable coins, for example, get very sketchy once you reach a certain size. If they keep growing, start embellished with dolaralized interest payments and such.... you now have a rogue banking system issuing its own US dollars. Good luck with that. The scale of fraud, and treacherously borderline fraud can be epic. I don't think we should downplay these.
OTOH, this is true of every part of the financial sector. Lets not pretend the current way the financial sector is structured isn't riddled with the kinds of problems crypto poses.
A country with some clever CB people, even a small one, should be bold and bring crypto into the pax. There's a lot you can do with a designed-4-a-purpose currency, and crypto is a very viable way to do many things. Bitcoin's origins, and much of crypto's present, is secrecy oriented. But, it's actually more natural to design a cryptocurrency for transparency. That's useful in a lot of circumstances.
Take time to understand wtf is going on and regulate, ban or encourage specific things for specific reasons. There's a lot to be gained, not just a lot to be lost. A properly regulated stable coin might be a great idea.
Keynes has made a comeback during the pandemic, and people are relearning war era ideas about controlling inflation. In that context and considering 2021's low interest rates, national savings bonds will probably soon be considered in various places. You don't need crypto to do this, but it does give you more flexibility in how you do it.
I think this isn't emphasized enough. With existing fiat money I have some degree of democratic control over monetary policy. With BTC, critical monetary policy was set by one person and if that monetary policy ever changes it will be decided by a combination of engineers and mining conglomerates.
Given how critical these policies are and how ideologically focused many of the non-speculators are, I am worried about growing systems with disastrous policy consequences.
BTC is at the point where if you don't have time or want to research what it really is, and only want to believe talking heads and authority figures, no one is going to take the time to explain it to you.
Those days are over, people have moved on and are using it for utility, without permission, how they see fit, whether as a currency or store of value.
Nothing can prevent a BTC transfer to anyone, anywhere, and at anytime. That is why China 'banned' it.
I am so tired of people insisting that I simply don't know anything.
The mining curve is monetary policy. For example, a 100% premined coin has very different properties than a coin with a fixed mining rate and no upper bound. The upper bound on the number of bitcoins is consistently pointed at by proponents as a means to prevent inflation. I can imagine no other phrase for this than "monetary policy".
The mining curve is reasonably described as monetary policy, seeing as it has a major impact on the distribution of coins and on inflation, which many crypto advocates worry about very deeply.
The mining curve was defined by Satoshi based on their original implementation. If there was to be a change in the mining curve we would need (1) a new version of the btc codebase that does mining rewards differently and (2) for the miners to swap to this fork. There is no mechanism for me, as a single person, to have a voice in this process except through contributing hash power to my preference. This is an amount of voting power associated with my wealth. That is antidemocratic.
Or do you want to just keep telling my that I am mysteriously ignorant over and over? That'll certainly endear people to the community.
Bitcoin and cryptocurrency es is a bunch of tech bros assuming they can run or set up a better monetary system than everyone else...
...without realizing that transaction media are an extremely powerful political and diplomatic tool, integral to maintaining national security, and will get stomped relatively quickly given enough time for governments to wrap their head around it.
Why is that interesting? Because popular sentiment (in the comments) on HN is very frequently wrong. HN is a tremendous resource for contrarian purposes.
For those who genuinely want decentralised currency, there's so many more efficient options
https://twitter.com/Theophite/status/1030225104234373121
I don't fly in airplanes but I use crypto. So why should you get to choose to do some activities that blast CO2 directly into the atmosphere but I can't? It is a disgusting, authoritarian ideology you have.
Besides that crypto can run on solar. Airplanes cannot. So I propose we ban airplanes. /s
The reality is you just don't like the politics behind the crypto movement. The climate is just a convenient bludgeon for you.
Isn't this whataboutism? A is not so bad because you know, B does it too.
In fact some countries, e.g. Kosovo and Montenegro, in the Balkans, use the euro as a de facto domestic currency since 2002, even though they have no agreements with the EU.
Crypto *is* volatile and wasteful compared to any of those.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulak
Behind every dollar is an unspoken promise that the US Marines will evacuate you middle of the night anywhere in the world if shit hits the fan.
Which has been recently proven to be quite an assumption.
Like what, NFTs for farts? Near as I can tell, the other main use cases for crypto - smart contracts, supply chain provenance tracking, and securities settlement processing really haven't panned out. Others have pointed out why it's not working as a currency. Literally all we have left is a vehicle for speculation.
I don't clearly see what you would actually propose banning. My opinion is it's technology, an idea, and that shouldn't be banned.
Just because one crypto currency is like that doesn't mean there cannot be another decentralized crypto currency that is better.
Just because your or mine imagination does not reach there doesn't mean there can't be somebody that can figure it out.
Why wouldn't it? Strong central government. Clear economic and social goals with the ends justifying whatever unethical means. A complacent middle and upper class satiated by enough new wealth to make them fat(ter than they used to be) and happy.
Why won't they be the next world power for the foreseeable future? Is there an anti-party faction in China that's larger and more powerful than I see in US media?
Or is this just wishful thinking from the west?
I think it’s reasonable to say the CCP will keep their grip on power for as long as they can continue delivering wealth to the middle class, and lifting those in poverty into the middle class. What’s not clear is how long the CCP can continue delivering that wealth.
The ongoing crisis with Everglade is showing that the CCP power and ability to generate wealth is not unlimited. I doubt it’s the beginning of the end, but it does shine a light on the long term structural flaws of their strategy. It’ll be interesting to see how the CCP deals with this over the next 10 to 20 years, maybe they’ll find a new strategy to maintain power, or maybe they’ll start a slow and gentle transition into democracy, allowing them to placate the middle class who won’t be seeing outsized wealth growth anymore.
Not saying it won’t happen, but I don’t think it’s a clear cut as you make it, and I think the CCP are smart enough to know that. They already do an astonishingly good job of treading the line between an authoritarian government that exploits it population for wealth, and one that empowers its populations for productivity and even greater wealth.
You can crush a thousand peasant farmers and replace them easily, you can't do that with the middle class without heavily setting back your economy and therefore being less competitive on the world stage.
The CCP will need to decide whether they want to release control and let their population produce value, or keep control and be unable to compete as a world power.
That's my take.
When things go poorly there is always an internal scapegoat, and knowing that no matter how low your situation is it’s (a) not your fault and (b) there is someone who has it worse is a great way to keep social cohesion through troublesome times. And if all else fails, one can find an external party and invade them as both a distraction and a way to deliver spoils to your loyalists.
I’d bet that things will get worse for ethnic and religious minorities in China during a downturn in the economy and if the economy continues to slowly slide for a decade then the neighbors of China like the Philippines will see more of their territory taken away.
They will not start demanding more freedom (only a small minority will do that). They will become increasingly agitated and demand the kind of economic progress they had before, which the CCP won't be able to deliver (the easy, fast, low-debt growth has largely been saturated).
Specifically the CCP | people-of-China socioeconomic pact is based on the country continuing to deliver massive economic gains to the bulk of the population.
Xi has begun a new cultural revolution (just ahead of the curve) because he recognizes it's going to be required to stomp down on the population in order for the CCP to retain its position, as the easy economic gains are well over. The leadership of the CCP recognizes what's inevitable about their context: they either had to let go of power increasingly, or they have to become more totalitarian, as the growth pact begins to falter. What waits for China the next 30 years, is significant demographic erosion, slow growth and epic persistent debt problems (which doesn't mean they aren't going to be a superpower, they are).
The only answer might be adding other countries into our representative government system (not colonialism, but peacefully and equitably adding other willing states that want to benefit from stable government). Seems people are already voting to join with their feet. Embrace it.
What is this? "Everglade" is a common enough word that I can't find anything besides mentions of the wetlands in Florida.
GP needs to learn to spell
Evergrande is an indebted chinese property developer which is the current ticking financial time bomb this week in China.
You mean Evergrande (3333.HK)
It's state propaganda. A (clever and very well designed) mix of known government actors and easily influenced third parties that work to push a specific narrative online. The thundering irony is that the west reports on such practices extensively when it comes to China, but the far more obvious actor (visible in the west) is your own government.
What do you mean by completely control covid? What intended result have they managed to arrive at?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps
It is not bigotry to stand up to authoritarianism and human rights abuses. You wield that term bigot to downplay the vast and monstrous human rights abuses occurring in Xinjiang. Its absolutely nothing to do with race or nationality. There is nothing intrinsic that would permit such actions to be attributed to this. It is not about bigotry. Connecting the two is all part of the metagame in pushing a state propaganda. Make your accuser seem less credible so you never have to address the actual substance of the complaint.
The reported incidents include Forced Labor and Sexual Abuse, Organ Harvesting and Genocide. On mass. This happened. This is happening. There is plenty of neutral international sources on this. Saying it doesn't exist is absurd. There is clear evidence of this!
These are not lies told by the western media, as the Chinese media claims. These are happening, they have been reported by people that have escaped, they have been raised to the UN. Most of the world has denounced this...
I am in the west.
>Its absolutely true!
It absolutely is not.
>There are very strong analogies here with Holocaust denialism, which some states see as such a problem they outlaw the philosophy!
Yes agreed, people shilled for the Nazis just as you are now shilling for the modern day Nazis.
>It is not bigotry to stand up to authoritarianism and human rights abuses.
You are standing up for American authoritarianism and war mongering.
>You wield that term bigot to downplay the vast and monstrous human rights abuses occurring in Xinjiang. Its absolutely nothing to do with race or nationality. There is nothing intrinsic that would permit such actions to be attributed to this. It is not about bigotry. Connecting the two is all part of the metagame in pushing a state propaganda. Make your accuser seem less credible so you never have to address the actual substance of the complaint.
There are no human rights abuses happening in Xingjiang. It was all made up by Adrian Zenz. A mentally ill person who believes that he was chosen by god to rid the world of homosexuals and communists. You choose to believe this despite the overwhelming weight of evidence against it and the complete lack of any evidence for it. What is your excuse for this? You need to explain yourself. For me that answer is obvious, you are a sinophobic bigot.
>The reported incidents include Forced Labor and Sexual Abuse, Organ Harvesting and Genocide. On mass. This happened. This is happening. There is plenty of neutral international sources on this. Saying it doesn't exist is absurd. There is clear evidence of this!
All of the ridiculous claims have been robustly debunked, all of them, repeatedly. The only people left who repeat this absurd conspiracy are useful idiots for American imperialism and proud bigots.
On genocide: https://twitter.com/asatarbair/status/1367632236007202819
https://journal-neo.org/2021/03/02/western-attempts-to-smear...
There is no evidence at all for your obnoxious claims. You are a racist. Shame on you.
Because you believe you are righteous does not mean you can spread false information you can easily question with your brain, the same as you believe you are righteous does not mean you can go into other country for WMD.
2015: https://archive.is/Higoz
2017: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bitcoin-china-idUSKCN1BJ1...
2018: https://www.businessinsider.com/china-eliminates-all-cryptoc...
2021: https://archive.is/s7nbw
"China Has Banned Bitcoin 13 Times Since 2012":
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-great-bitcoin-mining-mi...
What makes you think that? You do realise that they could easily outlaw 1) miners, 2) exchanges that convert to fiat, and 3) people privately exchanging to fiat, and (domestically) enforce that reasonably well, too.
And sure, there could still be an underground market - you can get still get weed and cocaine in China or Singapore, but I wouldn't recommend participating in it.
/s
just kidding. I see 'crypto', I think 'cryptography', and China banning cryptography (except for the party/government) doesn't seem that far fetched, so I think its a bad headline.
For instance El Salvador made bit-coin legal tender there... So china has out lawed what an other country has declared legal tender... Might make transactions between those 2 countries interesting....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plano_Real
... as is everything else? Other than governments declaring it illegal and intermediaries black listing it, I mean.
Relatedly, can they jam Starlink?
China has "banned Bitcoin" dozens of times over the last decade. I mean, this is an ancient and well-known meme involving a certain South Park clip after all.
Maybe this time is for real, but all of these media announcements have one thing in common. They always conflate the concept of "legal tender" and "legality."
The number of authorities around the world who have warned citizens about Bitcoin using language like "no legal tender status" and "risky" and "no government guarantee" is legion. Easily thousands of times. Every time "journalists" with no business reporting on tech, law, or foreign governments interpret this as a "ban." 99% of the time, nothing happens and there is no ban.
So, maybe this time is different. Over the last year, an initiative toward greater centralized control seems to be underway in China's tech and finance sectors. Disappearing of wealthy founders. Restrictions on video game consumption. The three red lines. The ejection of the Chinese mining industry.
Then again, maybe not.
This is a false narrative pushed by the Bitcoin cult. It's supposed to create an impression that nothing has changed, so the price should not change.
2013: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-12-05/china-s-p...
2015: https://archive.is/Higoz
2017: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bitcoin-china-idUSKCN1BJ1...
2018: https://www.businessinsider.com/china-eliminates-all-cryptoc...
2021: https://archive.is/s7nbw
"China Has Banned Bitcoin 13 Times Since 2012":
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-great-bitcoin-mining-mi...
https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&op=docs
https://www.google.com/search?q=%E5%8A%A0%E5%AF%86%E8%B4%A7%...
This seems like another step on a journey to maintain control over assets. So not the same thing as you have linked but nothing that should effect the market as China has been clear on its intentions.
I would be more curious about the larger game. A few front runner governments will establish there own ways to deal with crypto and then others will copy from a, b ,c. China's methodology is becoming more formal and therefore more copy able. I think we can already see the larger pattern and we already know who copies who traditionally... Would love to see a write up from this perspective.
You basically claim that Bitcoin was banned a month ago in China. But that is not true, it was legal to make Bitcoin transactions.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/search?q=china+ban+bitcoin&...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFp86n7QCf0
This analysis suggests that the value of tracking every financial transaction will eventually cause governments to all want to institute there own crypto currencies and eventually outlaw independent crypto currencies.
Panic/optimism/panic/whatever.
There’s nothing behind the price but pure sentiment.