It's adorable how smart people can write thousands of words making eloquent arguments against something nobody has the ability to eliminate. It's like writing "The Case Against People Gossiping About Other People". Maybe reading your arguments against gossiping persuade a few people to stop gossiping, but gossiping, like cryptocurrencies, is a thing that will never go away no matter how strong your case is.
That's a fair point - it does really make one think about what the merit for "the absolute case against any and all [anything really]" is at all. The people who will do the work which actually alleviates legitimate complaints about crypto will be doing it from the inside, as optimists, who see problems and find solutions, rather than giving up and declaring the problem an irrecoverable caner.
You don't like the energy being used for hashing? There is a lot of research and work going on in alternatives, most people know about Proof of Stake (though they mistake it for a sort of oligarchy). There are zero knowledge proofs as well - and this absolutism against hashing comes from the conception that crypto has no value (otherwise you have to do cost-benefit analysis and that is difficult, too difficult for most skeptics).
Don't like the insiders scamming newbies? Rather than outlawing the whole market, how about you join people working on presale distributions and contract readability so that investors bear similar or less risk to developers and don't require large initial investments from venture capitalists who are incentivized to dump on retail. And so that understanding what a smart contract does doesn't require decompiling bytecode to an object oriented langauge.
My point is - there are two ways to look at problems: optimism or pecimmism. Pessimism is simply the first half of optimism, the second half, the problem solving, is where the money gets made. Ironic the skeptics make it half way yet end up further than the typical Doge investor.
> where the only investment opportunity is as an economically corrosive synthetic hedge against all productive assets
Elementary finance theory (quoting Tobin's Separation Theorem here) argues that portfolios should be comprised of some weight of nearly all if not all of the available securities, as even assets with poor expected returns can be useful elements of a portfolio in order to improve diversification within the portfolio and reduce the portfolio's risk. Dumb money should be hedged against productive assets.
Is crypto a productive asset? The author's argument rests on the presumption of no. People who use cryptocurrency to cheapen and hurry the process of transferring capital across borders, compared to wire transfers, would say yes. Leave aside that international wire transfers could be sped up and made cheaper with a centralized authority in theory, the fact remains that in reality the fees are what they are. There's additional early work in using NFTs to deliver real-world benefits, where the issuer of the NFT derives value in outsourcing the tracking of who holds the rights to the real-world benefits to the miners propping up the backing blockchain rather than running their own centralized system. Is that enough value to justify the costs? Maybe. Hard to say. Too early to tell.
The US currently allows several forms of private currency:
-airline miles
-giftcards
-the institution which controls the us money supply (the fed) is a private corporation.
The US also tolerates several giant MLMs several of which are on major stock indices (Herbalife, Amway)
There is a huge difference between the positive freedom to not buy crypto and the negative freedom to staunch the economic activity of others.
Is crypto purchased for productive reasons? Largely no. Are there productive uses like bankless wire Xfers? Yes! Is it worse than MLMs, mileage programs or gambling? No
On the scale of US fiscal horrors it doesn't even touch debacles like healthcare.
There are, absolutely, crypto Ponzi schemes. (And stablecoins are largely such things) However there are also valid uses of crypto/Defi. I've used them myself to send funds easily. They are enabling truly symmetrically fair exchanges etc.
If you don't like crypto, don't buy it, don't mine it. Following eth 2.0 the energy usage will be minimal and it won't be harming you. Preserving positive freedoms generally and avoiding negative freedoms (constraints on others) is a good thing imo.
Author pointed to the 13 year time line and pretended the "internet" didn't also take 20 years for it to go from lab to actual wide spread public use.
NFTs in theory, are no less productive than fine art. And fine art (or IRL collectibles) are a well accepted form of diversified asset.
I'm not bought into the overall hype though. Some toots web3 will change human nature, as if "decentralized" decision making would magically make people less lazy and less selfish. I doubt that.
too early to tell is the best we can do right now.
Fine art and NFTs are not theoretically the same. With fine art there is only one object, which can only be picked up, looked at, and so forth, in one spot. People go to museums or private collections to go see these pieces because looking at them on a computer or in a print doesn't have nearly the level of detail needed to appreciate them. Seeing a reproduction or a computer image of fine art is like going to a movie theater VS watching a movie on an iPhone SE, or going to the opera VS listening to it on your iPhone. And only one person can own that experience.
This is untrue for NFTs. There is basically no value whatsoever to an NFT as far as I can tell VS say an svg of whatever image you downloaded. NFTs don't need to be owned to appreciate them, and "owning" them is basically meaningless insomuch as someone who takes a screenshot has about the same level of ownership as the person who "bought" it.
No need to limit your analogies. NFT's are digital and their use will be of a digital nature. Anyone who has participated in a virtual item marketplace can see clearly what NFT's are good for, even if that's not quite what most are yet. The primary issue with today's NFT's are that most lack a platform - a place to show them off like in game, or in (trigger warning for buzzword-phobics) a meta-verse style environment.
Blockchains are useful for things other than cryptocurrencies.
And it's not a conflict of interest to say you don't think blockchains should be used for currencies, much like it's not a conflict of interest for the inventor of dynamite to say he doesn't think dynamite should be used to blow people up. (Google "Nobel Prize".)
Public blockchains are a threat to private blockchains and so he has a conflict of interest. He should disclose that. He's like the CEO of WeWork writing against remote work.
Nothing can grow exponentially forever. Any guesses as to when this chart goes to singularity?
It turns out humans are just not good at running their own money supply. This has been true throughout history, even with a gold standard as coins were frequently debased. In current times, this chart of federal reserve assets is illustrative of the current environment:
The growth in that chart since 2008 is new money that was created not by banks making temporary loans but by the central bank outright printing new money and injecting it into the economy (QE). If the FED balance sheet shrinks the stock market will crash and there will be irresistible political pressure to do more QE.
Any guesses as to when this chart goes to singularity?
Actually, an exponential curve can go forever before it reaches a singularity. Because, you know, "math".
Not to say that over-reliance on QE isn't a problem. But it does sound like you're whipping out (scary-sounding) buzzwords (like "singularity") without understanding what they mean.
It's really about avoiding the bad equilibrium where everyone hoards tokens and few invest in building things to buy with these tokens (which happened during the Great Depression with gold tied currencies).
Which you could say is exactly what happens with the altcoins, then also for technical reasons: when the one crypto that first was didn't do what a young russian bord canadian wanted to do, a very different one got made. AND A BUNCH OF OTHERS NOW!
It's as if the market responded to not being provided with what it wanted (in terms of affordability or features) responded in a way where hoarders got fully circumvented...
While your statement is true, the universe is so big, that exponential growth at our (increasing) rate is still possible for many, many millenia (assuming no apocalypse scenario). Apart from that, money is inflationary by design.
The argument laid out in this article is a quite complicated edifice, and requires a large amount of knowledge at the intersection of several fields of study
I found this blog post interesting and wish it had a bibliography. Could anyone recommend some approachable sources to read more about the general themes in this post?
Another salient and damning article by Stephen Diehl. I would recommend anyone who uses cryptocurrency to read through his work and reconsider your position.
It's a bresh of fresh air to finally have someone technically literate investigating the technology and distilling the reasons why it's harmful to society.
I liquidated my Bitcoin position 16 months ago thanks to Stephen Diehl, and I suggest you do the same.
We are literally boiling the oceans. Are you going to continue to be a part of it?
I don't have anything substantive to add, but I find this drift frustrating. I think we're at the point that we have to put cryptography in full every time now.
No doubt professional cryptographers are the ones most inconvenienced by it.
Fascinating, like Taleb who has to invent his own private definition of value so he can claim that the value of BTC is 0, Diehl seems to have invented his own private list of real problems, which crypto isn't solving.
HN loves to post Stephen Diehl articles because recently he has started an anti-crypto crusade.
But FYI - he is a failed entrepreneur who tried to ride the “enterprise blockchain” wave and failed miserably. Now he spends his days writing screeds against crypto. He is a very weird guy
No doubt Bitcoin and other's proof of work system is horrible for sustainability. I enjoy reading these contrarian takes, it seems like this year over night my twitter feed previously of a lot of designers has turned into crypto twitter.
But I think it's a bit foolish to write off the entire industry as a whole due to some of these problems. I don't see payments use case taking off anytime soon but I find the SSO with Ethereum/data portability interesting. Love seeing the 'connect wallet' on sites and being able to interact with whatever UIs I choose to complete x task
> why I support forceful regulation to halt this financially corrosive enterprise from spreading further into market
This sounds like a religious crusade.
What is so sacred about your 'markets' that needs to be violently preserved? Overwhelming evidence shows that people voluntarily choose something like crypto and they will create something new even if you destroy crypto.
This is typical conservativism, oppression and vilification of 'things I don't like'
Look at his Twitter feed, he is completely obsessed with cryptocurrency and his newly acquired fame. He blocks anyone who is mildly critical of his opinions on Twitter and retweets anyone who quotes him. Cryptocurrency advocates have their share of fanatic believers and narcissists, but that guy surely takes the crown in the other camp.
This is a great answer. Unfortunately the early narratives around bitcoin, blockchain, and cryptocurrency revolved around crushing and replacing the global financial system rather than upgrading or offering a sensible alternative. Critics then point to these early holy rollers and blanket label anyone interested in crypto a a religious zealot (or a criminal masquerading as a zealot).
From the raw transactions I guess it’s hard to see whether it was stolen or a transaction by the legitimate owner.
More importantly the press should really start to dig these stories up, instead of focusing on every time an NFT was sold for $$$, or how many have become rich by the Bitcoin scheme.
Calling for laws that would, under pain of imprisonment, prohibit people from engaging in voluntary economic interactions using software called cryptocurrency, is inexcusable.
It's perfectly fine to not use crypto and warn others of its lack of utility. It is not fine to argue that we need centralized gatekeepers monitoring and permissioning private interaction between consenting adults, to keep us safe. It is a fundamentally illiberal position that lends credence to tyranny.
If "modern society" means a centrally controlled society without free choice, then modern society should change. What you're advocating is CCP-style subordination to the state and abolition of the right to engage in voluntary interaction with other consenting adults, and it's a travesty if this is what modern society is normalizing.
It's utterly illiberal, and corrals people into a handful of centralized companies like Venmo, PayPal and Patreon, who can abuse their monopoly status to de-person individuals on the margins, or make it far easier for an authoritarian government to enforce financial lockdowns to repress opposition.
>>Uninformed consent is worse than no consent. People are being duped.
Then don't use crypto, and warn other people to avoid it as well. You thinking the risks of crypto outweigh its benefits doesn't give you a right to take away people's choice in the matter.
ok but who cares if crypto is legit or not. As long as you make money from it? I thought that was the whole game. Yes from the next sucker who will pay more than you , once you figure this out you game the system and make a profit. And move to the next game. I like his blog post. Understand the rules of the game and be a better player.
How do you ensure that you react fast when the market crashes? Do you have some kind of stop-loss setup that pulls you out of the market faster than all the “losers” of the game?
> To contact me via email run one of the following scripts to generate my contact information. I find this is an effective filter against the deluge of emails from recruiters.
As a cryptocurrency skeptic, I like some of Diehl's posts however he seems more sure that the whole thing will collapse than I am. I think it could survive long term as a kind of digital gold, a investment having poor returns used in niche financial use cases.
I like this article because it emphasizes arguments about the dangers of deflationary coins going into widespread use (a point I made here: https://benoitessiambre.com/specter.html).
I'd like to add some minor clarifications that might help understand some of the mechanics of these dangers better:
> Money exists to exchange for goods and services in an economy. It is created to mediate the exchange of goods so that we have a common unit of account we can trade instead of bartering goods directly. Money needs to have a reliable and stable value compared to a domestic basket of common goods and services, in order to achieve that the supply of the money needs to be controlled by a monetary authority which can expand or contract the supply according to market fluctuations.
>A dynamic money supply is a fundamental necessity for a modern economy. A small amount of inflation discourages hoarding and incentivizes investment into productive enterprises which grow the economy and produce prosperity. Conversely a static money supply is inflexible in times of crisis because it does not allow intervention. Economies do not stabilize themselves and require active intervention to curb recessions.
What I want to add is that in some broader context, economies do stabilize themselves. Without a standardized government currency, if everyone was relying on barter or volatile coins (resulting in a super inefficient economy), things would usually automatically stabilize.
If you want a stable currency, a useful thing to have that helps generate a ton of prosperity, that's when you have to put in place mechanisms that prevents the currency from creating market gridlock and amplifying crises.
It's not that markets don't adjust themselves. It's that the existence of a deflationary government stabilized currency can prevent these adjustments. It can prevent them at an economy wide scale, causing untold human suffering through massive amounts of unemployment and destitution. The only solution we have to this (without getting rid of all stable currencies) is to make sure stable currencies are inflationary, that they lose value over time. As I mentioned, this is further explained here: https://benoitessiambre.com/specter.html and here: https://bessiambre.medium.com/the-world-deserves-a-pay-raise...
"Don't use it" is a bad argument in general. Gaining an option is not necessarily positive value, since other people can now attempt to coerce you into using it. I don't want there to be a straightforward irreversible way to send money to foreign cybercriminals; I want this to be impossible so that they don't attempt to extort these payments.
Similar logic explains why selling your kidney is illegal and why voting systems are designed to make it impossible to prove who you voted for.
Here's your TL;DR: if the author is right, crypto will actually hurt society. Not saying I agree with him, but it wouldn't just be a matter of adopting it or not. Nothing wrong with public discourse on the matter, would be more productive to directly refute his arguments.
Crypto has allowed citizens to circumvent oppressive and corrupt government financial abuse, as well as provided much cheaper, faster, more reliable and convenient means of transferring small - yet, life-changing - amounts of money cross-border.
An example of the latter:
A worker in one country sending half of her weekly paycheck back to her family overseas has two options presently: days of waiting (which means no food on the table for those days), uncertainty it will arrive at all (starvation, stress and pressure toward crime), and exorbitant fees taking anywhere from 15% - 50% of what she sends (shamelessly robbing the most vulnerable). By using the correct crypto alternatives, she can send the full amount, at a cost of fractions of a percent, and know with certainty if it has arrived - in seconds.
There is a reason crypto adoption is huge in poor and oppressed countries such as Venezuela, parts of Mexico etc.
There are other benefits, but this should be enough. Nothing else has been able to, nor likely could be able to have such an impact in any short space of time in these areas, and not without possessing many of precisely the same core principles shared by most crypto projects.
This doesn't mean crypto is perfect or doesn't have problems. And it doesn't mean we should ignore those problems.
But it does mean that the endlessly served-up misinformation that crypto "has no benefits", works toward harming less-fortunate people who've suffered more than anyone should have to.
Do you have any data showing how “huge” cryptocurrencies have been for facilitating legitimate international money transfers, compared to pre-existing alternatives?
The XRP Ledger, often in conjunction with local cryptocurrency exchanges, has been involved in many such projects. It's one of Ripple's main marketing points.
For others, conduct a simple search for the name of low-income, despotic, crime-ridden nations plus "cross-border" and "cryptocurrency" to find news coverage.
Finally, look at the overall crypto market capitalisation. It's in the trillions.
It's ludicrous to think that a decades-old, trillion-dollar industry has literally ZERO real-world benefit applications.
Here's an article in Mercator's Payments Journal I found in 3 seconds:
I’m not saying it’s not possible for it to be used this way. But you used the word “huge” to describe its popularity for legitimate cross border transactions, which is meaningless without data. On the other hand, if the vast majority of its use is for speculation and money laundering, then policymakers may decide to throw out the baby with the bath water.
It’s sort of like BitTorrent. Does it have legitimate use cases? Sure. Is the vast majority of its use to illegally share files? Also yes. (Note that approximately zero mainstream content providers such as Apple Music, Spotify, or Netflix use BT for delivering bits to customers.)
The "reason" I was referring to was the context of the discussion, ie, whether or not crypto is legitimately useful for anything. Well, it is - it's tremendously useful, even vital, to the underprivileged populations of some countries.
One of those uses I gave as an easy example, is cross-border payments, and indeed nevertheless I suppose it could still be argued this could also be "huge" in some places.
Of course mainstream content providers are not going to use BT to deliver content, despite it being well-suited in many ways and would save them a shit-tonne in expenses and benefit consumers greatly. The problem is its unfounded stigma, which is fuelled by precisely the same kind of uneducated hyperbole seen here regarding crypto.
Look, the simple facts are the following:
- the existing monetary system is either collapsing, inefficient, holding us back, or all three
- a new monetary system has been developed that is already replacing the worst excesses and failures of the old one. It's been in use and development for over a decade and has grown into the trillions
There are no other alternatives I'm aware of with even remotely the same level of adoption, person-hour investment, or financial backing that could possibly have a hope in hell of replacing the incumbent systems anytime soon.
Iterative updates and sad caricatures of crypto run by governments are not going to preserve your life savings when a government defaults on debt and freezes citizens bank withdrawals.
Existing crypto can do and has done that, among other things.
For example, El Salvador recently made Bitcoin legal tender.
The government has proclaimed BTC as legal tender. Whether people will actually use it is another matter. Current indications are this move is wildly unpopular and its adoption is floundering.
In Venezuela it's in everyday use
In a country with a truly basket-case economy like Venezuela I can imagine BTC making some sort of sense.
Current legacy media reporting on El Salvador indeed makes it seem as if the idea is wildly unpopular. That doesn't mean however, that this is reality. As for basket-cases; the USD money supply [0], and again, no real "news" coverage.
4x supply over the past 20 years is a crude average of about 7.5% inflation per year. Even worse, it's exponential.
You're replying to new information based on multiple references, instructions on how to locate more, and well-reasoned arguments about these things, with a single, flippant sentence that pretends none of it exists.
People should be free to spend their wealth on whatever they want, whether it's crypto, high-powered gaming computers, or abstract art.
If the environmental costs of crypto mining are genuinely your concern, the best solution is to advocate an agnostic solution, like restricting CO2 generating sources of energy, or energy consumption for ALL non-essentials (e.g. tourism, video games, crypto, etc).
Singling out crypto for its environmental costs, and calling for targeted restrictions on it that exempt other non-essential uses of energy, suggests a superficial basis for your position, like a negative emotional association, or dislike of crypto proponents.
>>So, you're saying I should run my unlicensed nuclear testing facilities?
That is not a voluntary interaction. Nuclear reactors pose an uncontrolled risk to all those in their vicinity.
Yours is a hyperbolic analogy, and likely just a trope you wheel out whenever you encounter an opponent of your anti-libertarian "you only have the rights I agree you should have" ideology.
>>It's a hyperbole, but Bitcoin suffer from both of those: heavy externalities, and interfacing with black market.
I've already commented on how the externalities should be addressed.
As for the "black market" angle, there is a fundamental difference between designs for weapons of mass destruction, and targeted restrictions on their dissemination, and dragnet controls over all financial interactions, in an attempt to preempt a host of crimes.
The former targets a true threat, and takes proportionate measures to mitigate it. The latter rejects the first principles of a free and liberal society, in instituting warrantless mass-surveillance and centralized gatekeeping of practically all private economic interactions, in the name of preempting crime, and in doing so, creates a hyper-centralized power structure that is in itself a massive threat to humanity.
Life doesn’t work that way. We should try to prioritize the use of valuable and finite resources to those things we think are most valuable to society. Usually we leave that prioritization to the free market, but we also sometimes have to take corrective actions to prevent misallocations that would be harmful or destructive to society, the planet, or the human race.
Life works however we want it to work. "Life" doesn't mean "my ideology's preferred state of affairs".
>>We should try to prioritize the use of valuable and finite resources to those things we think are most valuable to society.
No, we shouldn't. People should always be free to decide for themselves how to expend their share of those finite resources. There is nothing inherently more valuable about one non-essential activity over another.
If a person wants to spend their resources running high powered gaming machines, that is not inherently more valuable than spending it mining crypto. Your subjective determination that one non-essential activity is more valuable than another is just that: a subjective opinion. It doesn't govern someone else's subjective determination.
>>There’s a whole encyclopedia of free-market failure modes that’s worth reading up on
I did not advocate an absence of government intervention. I explained how to make such intervention congruent with the values that are stated to be the intervention's motivation:
>>If the environmental costs of crypto mining are genuinely your concern, the best solution is to advocate an agnostic solution, like restricting CO2 generating sources of energy, or energy consumption for ALL non-essentials (e.g. tourism, video games, crypto, etc).
>>Singling out crypto for its environmental costs, and calling for targeted restrictions on it that exempt other non-essential uses of energy, suggests a superficial basis for your position, like a negative emotional association, or dislike of crypto proponents.
We form governments and associations, and have them set rules, in order to accomplish more than we can accomplish separately. This means relinquishing some individual freedom of choice and prioritizing our use of resources. If you disagree with those choices, that’s fine, and you’re free to make your disagreements known and vote accordingly, but living in a society means accepting that you can’t just do whatever you want, everyone else be damned.
>>We form governments and associations, and have them set rules, in order to accomplish more than we can accomplish separately.
One more time: you are arguing against a strawman. I've already shown I am not opposed to government intervention in principle.
>>This means relinquishing some individual freedom of choice and prioritizing our use of resources.
No, the existence of government and the pursuit of common goals through it does not require restricting any one's right to freely interact with other consenting adults, or depriving them of their private property.
>>but living in a society means accepting that you can’t just do whatever you want, everyone else be damned.
Living in a free society means being able to engage in voluntary interactions with other consenting adults, the judgment of others be damned.
I will keep making the case that violating people's right to engage in voluntary interactions with other consenting adults, is always wrong. The Quakers spent centuries arguing against slavery, and were in the extreme minority for most of that period. Progress sometimes takes time.
I think healthcare would benefit from legalizing the provision of medical service by un-certified individuals, as well as providing more than one tier of certification, where people who can't afford fully certified practitioners, but would like the assurance of some certification, have that option.
Instead of making it illegal for individuals who don't possess full certification to practice medicine, the law could instead require medical practitioners to disclose their level of certification, and any warnings the state provides in relation to that.
So for example, an uncertified doctor/nurse may be required to disclose not only that they are uncertified, but also the warning that the state strongly advises against using uncertified medical practitioners.
Why providing these options is critically important is that sometimes the prescribed institutions fail, and an escape hatch is a life saver. Take this case of a woman in Canada who had to wait two years to get a test that diagnosed her with cancer, because of a shortage of state-licensed doctors:
Society has imposed heavy regulations on the most important industries, and the result is that the most important industries are the most dysfunctional:
>>Here's some food for thought: The number of physicians in the United States grew 150 percent between 1975 and 2010, roughly in keeping with population growth, while the number of healthcare administrators increased 3,200 percent for the same time period.
*
>>Supporters say the growing number of administrators is needed to keep pace with the drastic changes in healthcare delivery during that timeframe, particularly change driven by technology and by ever-more-complex regulations. (To cite just a few industry-disrupting regulations, consider the Prospective Payment System of 1983 [1]; the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act of 1996 [2]; and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Act of 2009. [3])
It takes a lot of nerve to compare the morals of
anti-slavery to the right to swindle people and take advantage of our most vulnerable members of society.
You are crudely generalizing an entire class of ostensibly voluntary interactions, as "swindling", and prohibiting them all on that basis, and then handing out exemptions from that prohibition on a case by case basis, upon a party receiving approval from a centralized gatekeeper.
What you are effectively advocating for is a massive limitation on people's rights to freely interact with others, and using their safety - as if you know better what's best for them - to justify it.
I’m not personally doing any such thing. The people who make the rules are ourselves through the democratic process, guided by a set of morals and tenets that we take reasonable measures to protect the weaker and less powerful or capable among us.
Now you may disagree with those tenets, and that’s of course your right; but people should understand why we make such rules based on history and have at least some amount of respect for what came before, imperfect though it may be.
Ideological purity doesn’t serve anyone well, because the world is a messy and complicated place. Every rule has exceptions; there are shades of gray; etc.
>>take reasonable measures to protect the weaker and less powerful or capable among us.
Those measures, which you support, are what I described:
crudely generalizing an entire class of ostensibly voluntary interactions, as "swindling", and prohibiting them all on that basis, and then handing out exemptions from that prohibition on a case by case basis, upon a party receiving approval from a centralized gatekeeper
And yes, democracy can support laws that violate of human rights. Democracies instituted slavery for instance, often justifying it with claims that it was to protect the slaves from the dangers of freedom.
>>but people should understand why we make such rules based on history and have at least some amount of respect for what came before, imperfect though it may be.
I am definitely open to hearing about the arguments for those restrictions, but I have looked quite a bit, and what I've seen is those restrictions inflicting massive harm on society on the balance. Again I am open to seeing what evidence you have of the contrary.
And this is consistently the case when I look at different industries, and the reason I believe it's a universal effect is due to basic organizational dynamics: a free-er system has a larger range of options, and thus is more likely to discover, through trial and error and the natural tendency of people to seek out mutually beneficial configurations, superior processes.
I described what I see as strong indications of that with respect to healthcare in earlier comments. I've seen the same thing when I look at venture capital fundraising:
There are still prohibitions on drug use that most agree should still be upheld due to the serious harm they tend to cause (addiction -> crime, serious health decline) relative to their benefits: heroin, fentanyl, cocaine, crystal meth, etc. Go spend some time in some majority Black neighborhoods in the U.S. like deep East Oakland, Detroit, Philadelphia, etc. if you want to get a real sense of how bad the problems are and what the locals think about it. Or spend some time in poor white areas in Appalachia or the midwest U.S.
Studies on laws limiting what interest rates payday loan companies may charge suggest such laws are net-harmful, because they reduce the availability of such loans, leading to people resorting to worse options, like bank overdrafts, or not paying rent being evicted:
>>There are still prohibitions on drug use that most agree should still be upheld due to the serious harm they tend to cause (addiction -> crime, serious health decline) relative to their benefits
Prohibition is the reason there is a link between addiction and crime. In the absence of prohibition, prices would be as low as ground coffee, and no one would need to commit crime to support their habit.
Another example of the harm of prohibition is the effect it had on how concentrated the drugs were in the form sold. In the late 19th century before prohibition most of these drugs were found in low concentrations in the products that marketed them.
With the advent of prohibition, producers started to create higher concentration doses because such doses were easier to smuggle.
> Prohibition is the reason there is a link between addiction and crime. In the absence of prohibition, prices would be as low as ground coffee, and no one would need to commit crime to support their habit.
You don't understand how poor some people really are. And there are values to consider, like quality of life and justice, other than pure economic efficiency. We don't want people to be hopelessly enslaved to drugs and unable to otherwise lead productive, meaningful lives, even if drugs are as cheap as "ground coffee."
Please, I beg you, actually spend some time in the Real World instead of sitting in your comfy room and relying on Google searches in vain attempts to justify your cold academic view of the world.
No one in the developed world is so poor that they would need to commit crime to pay for drugs, if the drug market was unrestrictedz and could be bought alongside baking soda at the hardware shop. They would die from an overdose long before they spent their entire welfare cheque.
>>We don't want people to be hopelessly enslaved to drugs and unable to otherwise lead productive, meaningful lives, even if drugs are as cheap as "ground coffee."
Of course, and in that case, the person can be segregated from wider society, and committed to a rehabilation center.
>>Please, I beg you, actually spend some time in the Real World instead of sitting in your comfy room and relying on Google searches in vain attempts to justify your cold academic view of the world.
I have plenty of real world experience. The real world consequence of people in the government controlling our private interactions is inefficiency and corruption, that reduces the opportunities, wealth and hope available to marginalized people who are not connected to the insiders who control the levers of power.
What it essentially boils down to is him saying "this isn't useful for me, therefore it isn't useful for society, therefore it will hurt society because it has nonzero cost and no benefit". If I'm being too strict then we'll say he thinks the balance tips towards cost outweighing benefit.
But not everyone subscribes to this sort of extreme collectivist mindset.
You don't have to believe I derive value from it because I don't need you to believe it. It still works.
There is nothing to refute. I mostly just find it amusing that these people think we care. They're just talking to themselves.
It's a trap for people like me to even respond to this stuff, we could be out doing things instead of arguing the toss about whether sugar is tasty or not. Like yo, I like it and it works for me. I don't care whether the health service in aggregate likes me eating sugar.
> The history of private money is one of repeated disasters that destroy public trust
We are talking about crypto currencies, right? This guy is living in the world where the private bank in charge of how many US Dollars get created are holding the assets driven up by their decisions? This feels like a satire piece. How exactly is Bitcoin or a network modeled after it subject to private control? That's never explained, because its a complete farce.
Really anyone piling on to this should be embarrassed, as someone whose confidence in their knowledge of crypto currencies grows with every thread I read on HN, and believes in the vision, I could write a much better hit piece than this - the difference of course being that as an optimist who sees the problems, I invest in the solutions. Its no wonder someone with such a warped view of the space sees no value - he's trying to find his car keys through beer bottles.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn Mr. Diel's has some short sell positions against various cryptos. I wonder if HN understands the significance of that bias...
Congress, subject to the U.S. Constitution and being our duly-elected representatives, could (in theory) pass a law replacing the Dollar tomorrow as the U.S.’s unit of currency. That’s what makes our currency a Public Thing.
Cryptocurrencies are strictly private things because no government—even a legitimate one—or public mechanism can manipulate them.
That's a half definition. The other half of "private" is 'centrally controlled by a single organization.' Are the open seas private because the government doesn't control them?
This is all just silly word games anyways. You (should) well know the basics of how at least Bitcoin works and how it cannot be reasonably controlled by anyone (barring state violence against users) if you are to speak on it at all.
Private does not mean control by a single entity. I don’t know where you got that from. Ownership of private property is massively distributed across the population. (Consider everyone’s clothing, mobile phones, homes, cars, food.)
Yes many people privately own things. They alone control them, or as a private group. The point is that calling Bitcoin private in the sense of property or in the sense of business is simply ignorant. Any participant can get involved in Bitcoin's protocol with less barrier to entry than any stock exchange, and (I can't believe I have to type this) Bitcoin is not controlled by any single person or private group of people.
So please explain how Bitcoin is private or close to it, or cede the point.
The question is whether or not the public, through its duly-elected representatives according to a constitution, has created the thing and has put the duly-elected executor in majority control over it. If that is the case, I would call that a public thing.
Other things, I would call private. Just because a group of people got together and made a thing -- even if that thing is usable by the public -- doesn't make that thing a public thing, if the public has no ability to make a binding decision through its democratic processes to change it.
Great well we can cut definitions all day but in effect the comparison I just challenged you on which you ignored and is the crux of a fourth of the blog post isn't going to be more illuminated by pedantism. It's clear Bitcoin behaves completely unlike a private good in total.
What about money laundering? And does it not make the time-honored profession of ransoming so much more ... frictionless?
I am so tired of hearing these sour-grape protestations that crypto does not solve real problems that real people have.