
Forbes on why we need to shut Bitcoin and all other cryptocurrencies down - tiuPapa
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2018/03/10/we-need-to-shut-bitcoin-and-all-other-cryptocurrencies-down-heres-why/
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mattnewport
The title is a little misleading. It makes it sound like this is some kind of
official Forbes position piece or even the opinion of Steve Forbes himself,
but it's just a Forbes contributor. There are many of those and they're really
just glorified bloggers. The disclaimer is there for a reason: "The author is
a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer."

It's odd to even include that in the title. Stories from e.g. the New York
Times do not usually have a title starting "The New York Times on..."

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tiuPapa
Sorry, really bad choice of words on my part.

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Klathmon
So the argument comes down to "if we can't stop criminals from using it, it
should be illegal"?

That seems pretty weak...

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lawn
It's simple really.

Make everything illegal.

~~~
shrimp_emoji
Crypto. Encryption! Guns. Social media!

If terrorism has taught us anything, it's that security is more important than
freedom.

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stevemk14ebr
I'd hardly say that's the lesson terrorism has taught us. It taught us the
people make laws that value security over freedom. I very much disagree that
it's the correct response or 'more important'.

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SlowBro
“We must make all cryptocurrency as we know it today illegal.” A feature of
crypto is its resistance to regulation. Go ahead and try to make it illegal.
It may reduce the price but the technology won’t go away. That cat is already
out of the bag.

And unless I’m misunderstanding this article, what he says applies to all
malware. If I’m not mistaken malware scanners now look for malware mining
software.

The author is just demonstrating that he doesn’t understand crypto.

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bdcravens
Bitcoin's value these days is tightly coupled with its exchange value. Crypto
is resistant to regulation and decentralized; exchanges are not. (yes there
are decentralized exchanges with close to no volume, and LocalBitcoin, but the
lion's share goes through exchanges that rely on the traditional banking
system)

All you need to do is make ACH transactions for virtual currency illegal and
you'd rip the reasons for the mainstream to use it out of their hands. It
would still exist; the technology is the same at $20 as $20,000. It could
still be used for a barter/digital economy, but you'd kill speculation.

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SlowBro
I wasn't speaking about its value though. Just saying that it can't be made
completely illegal. There will always be crypto around in some form.

It was one of the best ways to get one's wealth off the island of Cyprus in
2013 during their banking crisis. There was a freeze on transferring wealth to
other nations from the island, so islanders bought BTC instead.

"Life, uh, finds a way." ~Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park

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bdcravens
I agree that Bitcoin couldn't be made illegal. I suspect if there's a drive to
contain Bitcoin, it would at the banking level; driving down the price would
presumably have the desired effect (making coinware untenable)

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mikhailfranco
The whole point of Bitcoin is to avoid petty self-important fascist central-
control freaks like the author (apparently a Mr Bloomberg writing on Forbes
just to confuse people).

Blockchain is probably the best system for establishing distributed trust in
Byzantine conditions since the Freemason's secret handshake. It will take more
than a whining blog post to make it go away.

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philippnagel
1\. The author does not acknowledge the existence of non-POW crypto assets.

2\. Illicit mining is easy to detect and mitigate.

3\. If you can't stop it, make it illegal? Sounds hardly like a compelling
argument.

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amelius
I'd much rather have an illicit miner on my system than any other kind of
malware/rootkit. At least the miner has an incentive to _not_ do bad things to
my system and data, and leave the network mostly unused to avoid detection.

On the other hand, mining still takes a lot of energy and drives up GPU costs
...

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godzillabrennus
[http://archive.is/KA3Cq](http://archive.is/KA3Cq) \- Mirror that you can see.

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mankash666
Looks like the author missed out on the initial crypto euphoria, and now wants
up take it out on those who did

