Hacker News Reader

Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

Paraphrasing previous comment - I get the "see cryptos are too insecure / it's a pyramid / it's a bubble / ICOs are scams / etc" arguments.

But holy shit turning a world currency into the wild west - for better or worse - is going to be disruptive, period.

I can only imagine the debacles that we have to look forward to, and I say that in full support of and as a long term believer in both blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

View on HN

There will emerge a "CryptoCurrency+ruleOfLaw" that will succeed in the evolutionary race.

All Ethereum contracts will incorporate the entirety of the relevant national, state, and local laws into their code.

I certainly don't look forward to auditing a Solidity contract with the complexity of the federal tax code.

Maybe we could just sticky this comment for every crypto thread.

It's interesting to see the objections change over the years. It used to be "bitcoin will never last past the year" to "bitcoin will never survive the next 30 years".

Well, the coins have to come out of that wallet eventually, and you can trace where they go.. so.. I wonder if there will ever be any attempt by a government to extradite somebody based on stolen crypto.

That's not the case for every cryptocurrency, though. Some are untraceable.

At some point you have to turn your currency into something useful to you. I won't say that this is always traceable, but Bitcoin doesn't obviate the need for a fence.

Yes but the private currencies break the linkage between transactions. You turn the currency into something useful, and that's probably traceable to you, but nobody can tell where that currency came from.

Right, but the transaction that turns Bitcoin into another currency is traceable because someone needs to claim that currency, either via ETF into a bank account or physically going to pick it up.

Absolutely, and for Bitcoin that's a big problem for a thief. But for a private currency like ZCash or Monero, nobody can tell where the coins came from. They can't prove you stole them.

E.g. with one scheme, you destroy your coins and get a proof that you destroyed them. Later you can submit your proof to the blockchain and get new coins minted for you. But it's provably impossible to for anyone to figure out which coins you destroyed.

You could just spend them at a legitimate business though.

How do you redeem your goods and services without somehow tying it to yourself? For example, physical goods need to be shipped somewhere. There seems to be a limited number of things that you can spend your cypto-currency on that would not somehow be traceable back to an actual person, no?

Bitcoin can be tracked and a government could mandate that the bitcoins you use to buy a house be from the "legitimate" subset of bitcoins. With Monero, you can earn money from selling weed and turn around and buy a car with the exact same coins. Nobody can even ask you to prove where they came from, short of declaring them as income, (as with cash) but that becomes much harder when you can just fly to France, buy a house there (the government doesn't care if you paid taxes for that money in another country), and fly back.

It's always the wild west when a technology or medium is new, isn't it? The same could be said of the web in the nineties or facebook/mobile apps a decade ago.

The nominal value at risk puts it in a different category.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com