Ray Dalio says the government could ban bitcoin
businessinsider.com.au
businessinsider.com.au
The original interview is here, and the Bitcoin segment starts at 14:30:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJ82qABNWQA
The whole interview is worth a watch if you're interested in his perspective on the global economy. What Dalio actually said was in the long run he wouldn't be surprised if the US Government eventually attempt to ban Bitcoin, and he made the historical comparison to gold (which he favours).
For those that don't know their history[1]: "in 1933, Executive Order 6102 had made it a criminal offense for U.S. citizens to own or trade gold anywhere in the world, with exceptions for some jewelry and collector's coins.". These restrictions lasted for 30 years
I actually tend to agree with him. Bitcoin blows a gaping hole in any capital controls any government could ever want to impose, and its one available to ordinary plebs with an Internet connection.
The reality is though, only 3% of the ~32 million funded wallets in existence actually transact every day[2], and only 7 million wallets globally have more than $1,000 USD worth in them[3]. Bitcoin isn't really a threat to anything yet.
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/india-proposes-ban-bitcoin-us...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Reserve_Act
[2] https://www.bitcoinmarketjournal.com/how-many-people-use-bit...
[3] https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses....
* power usage
* environmental issues
* worsening chip shortage
Do we have technical reason for proof of work? Isn't proof of stake as safe anyway?
I would be in favor of banning PoW. Projects can switch anyway
All those GPUs wasted on rendering Cyberpunk 2077!
All this energy wasted playing Minecraft!
Come to think of it, you should stop reading and commenting on HN. Every minute you unnecessarily keep you laptop powered uses energy and destroys the environment. Do your part to prevent the tragedy, I beg of you!
Yet what about the websites that load over 10MB of JS/other tracking scripts? Globally it probably uses more energy than entire continents! Or at the very least uses 5-10% of battery life that could otherwise be saved.
Let's start by banning > 1MB of tracking related JS/adverts which do far, far, far more damage than Bitcoin.
Sauce: Use a simple web browser on mobile, one with adblock/tracking block and one without, see how fast the device with no adblock reaches 0%, I bet it doesn't take much time at all on the really heavy JS pages.
Lol.
I specifically pointed out that it's not about banning bitcoin. Make bitcoin a PoS. You can keep trading, you can keep being decentralized.
bitcoin and PoW are separate. bitcoin *can* be updated.
Why so defensive on PoW?
> * environmental issues
Might want to take a gander at who is really using all that energy mining Bitcoin: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1200477/bitcoin-mining-b...
The environmental impact argument to me seems like more of the same: China wastes energy and pollutes on a massive scale and western countries are the ones getting a stern talking to. Give me a break, it’s a convenient argument, but at the end of the day Bitcoin is a way for regular citizens to (mostly) keep the government’s hands off their wealth.
A switch to PoS like ETH2 is not going to make it lose value, decentralization and might even be an opportunity to go beyond the ridiculous 4-7 transactions/sec limit.
Going beyond the 4-7 transaction/sec would make so that exchanges stop asking you to give up control of the money, thus making it even more decentralized.
I see only positive benefits in switching to Pos. Lose nothing, gain everything
What is the evidence for the "regular citizens" claim? Is there data on which social groups are over-/underrepresented in Bitcoin holding compared to non-Bitcoin wealth holding? My guess is that groups low in regular wealth/income are disproportionally low in Bitcoin wealth.
Government activities such as defense, education and infrastructure will still need funding. If some resource A shifts to Bitcoin and, assuming for argument, thereby becomes non-taxable won't some other non-Bitcoin resource B be taxed instead, with no net "hands off" effect?
That doesn't include transactions within wallets (ie: coinbase), regulated market transactions (GBTC/OBTC), lightening network, other crypto currencies.
Bitcoin is a $1 trillion market cap store of wealth (though an estimate 20% of that is probably lost), it's really huge. Its economy now is larger than some countries, and only a couple countries (China/USA) could probably fully sabotage it today.
If France wanted to "shutdown" bitcoin, they'd probably fail and the most that comes out of it is a minimal price depreciation. In the future, only a coordinate global effort will be able to shutdown the network.
$1T market cap doesn't mean $1T of value is 'stored'. I can create a unique piece of art and offer to sell you a 0.000005% share for $50,000. You might even be silly enough to buy it. Congrats, the market cap of my doodle is now $1T. So I guess I now have $1T of value stored? No.
Companies with billion dollar market caps can go bust and go to zero. There's no "store of value" implied by a particular market cap, because those valuations are based on forward-looking discounted future earnings, taking in to account future outlook (earnings growth) and market sentiment (premiums and discounts).
While Bitcoin and gold share some properties on the supply side, where they differ is that gold has very predictable demand which gives relative price stability. Half is used for jewelry and ~10% is used in industry. It's the price stability that people are referring to when they say gold is a "store of value".
Only ~330,000 Bitcoin have been created in the last 6 months. Even at currently prices (~$50K) that's only $16.5bn of new 'storage'. Everything else generated throughout the 6x increase in market price in that time is speculative. If significant outflows start, that $1T can evaporate very quickly.
If you buy or hold Bitcoin today you have to decide whether it actually has $1T worth of net benefit to society.
First, the government forced people to sell gold to government and forbade hoarding it.
Bitcoin market cap today is $1 trillion. It would cost US government a pretty penny to re-purchase BTC owned by US citizens. That's today. Within a year market cap could be $2 trillion.
What if they just ban it without purchasing current Bitcoin? Even a two bit lawyer would immediately sue such law as unconstitutional. To me it's clearly "unreasonable seizure" under "unreasonable search and seizure" clause.
You think taking guns away is hard? Try taking hundrends of billions of dollars from tens of thousands of Americans.
Second, apparently the reason they did is: FED wanted to print money but they had a stupid rule of pegging us dollar to gold so to print more money they needed more gold.
This doesn't apply to Bitcoin (and I'm guessing the rule is long gone).
So in my opinion outright banning of Bitcon by U.S. Government would be unconstitutional and buying it out is already too expensive to be politically viable. Imagine a bill that would set hundreds of billions of dollars on fire.
I don't see how you'd argue that the government has to pay the imaginary value that bitcoin fans ascribe to their currency. If the government removes or adds laws, it can create or destroy business models and tank stock and commodity prices. As of right now, BTC are just securetized CO2-waste. If the price drops after the US bans it for environmental damage, well it's the market. You are free to transact BTC in the rest of the world after all.
To prevent inflows from outside of its borders it could simply require that anyone redeeming prove that they are 1) a US citizen, 2) purchased the coins prior to a certain date and 3) did so with their own capital/earnings.
Sure the Fed would have to print a lot of dollars, but the Gov could then sell any coins it reaped in foreign markets, crashing the price overseas and only losing the premium they paid. The crashing price would drive further domestic redemption.
The market cap may be $1T but the trading volumes are tiny ($80bn/day peak), so the US could easily take it down with a concerted effort, particularly if other major nations (like the EU) were also in the game.
You're naive if you think the US and the EU simultaneously banning Bitcoin (and other decentralized cryptocurrency) wouldn't render it an interesting historical footnote. It's a speculative asset that doesn't have enough real world utility for anyone to go to war over.
BTW, Texas governor just stated he fully supports Bitcoin adoption.
They published an article about Bitcoin a while back: https://www.bridgewater.com/research-and-insights/our-though...
But given that the ledger data is public I could see it become regulate so that to buy and sell crypto you need to go through a Know your customer(KyC) process. So they know who's behind which wallet address.
This way states can create white lists and black lists of wallet addresses. Only allow white listed miners to add new bitcoins/crypto to exchanges. This will make sure sanctioned nations can't trade with US companies. The can pretty much track in real time when illegal transactions are taking please by cross referencing if transactions from black listed to white listed addresses are taking place and fine instantly. Chain analyses have already been used to find criminal activity.
Well, making it illegal to own Bitcoin alone is only enough to delegate it to criminals and libertarian "fbi can come and get me" types.
Even if they can't technically police it, it's enough that if you're ever caught with it you can go to jail / pay a fine to discourage most.
And of course this means all exchanges have to close, whether in the US, or in places where the US can excert force (not to mention the other countries govermenets might as well agree), etc.
You already need KYC today for most exchanges. This status quo is unlikely to remain, however, given that Decentralized Exchanges are likely to become cheap and efficient in the future.
> The can pretty much track in real time when illegal transactions are taking please by cross referencing if transactions from black listed to white listed addresses are taking place and fine instantly.
I think when this happens most people will realize how important the current Proof Of Work concept is. It basically means this white/black listing becomes very hard vs. PoS where the big holders could be manipulated by some government.
Decentralized exchanges are not the solution to the given problem unless I'm missing something. AFAIK on a decentralized exchange I can trade my BTC for ETH but I can not trade my USD or EUR for ETH.
> I think when this happens most people will realize how important the current Proof Of Work concept is. It basically means this white/black listing becomes very hard vs. PoS where the big holders could be manipulated by some government.
Are you implying that miners, unlike POS holders, are not humans, or are a special breed of humans, and thus can not be manipulated by governments?
Out of the 140-180 million US voters, I would happily bet that not a huge percentage own crypto.
I still don't think this will happen, though.
Nope. Streisand effect is about not being able to keep something off the media/press/gossip/etc when you try to make it so.
It's not about the inability to make something illegal and be succesful at it (because of what? many people learning about the law? That's a bonus for laws).
>This genie isn’t going back in the bottle
It very easily can: "You have 6 months to register your bitcoin with the authorities and covert it to dollars and/or pay taxes on it. If you still have such addresses after that you'll be illegal. Exchanges should ceaze operations immediately".
convert it with whom? US government? Foreign investors?
In the most extreme case — if mere possession has a penalty in law — BTC could even have a negative price. People could conceivably sell it to their own government below zero to avoid being fined by the same.
And it might not -- if that was the case, the owner would have to try to sell it to wherever they can within the time span.
Which would also mean a flooded market and falling prices, but why would the government care about that? In the end, they get a tax share of the smaller, dollar converted, amount.
As for the bitcoin owners losing money because of this, well, that money were in the form of a monetary asset that was not guaranteed by the government, in the first place. It's not like they lost private property, more like they made a bad (non-)investment...
A ban requires an ongoing attack on the bitcoin network
An ongoing attack on the bitcoin network doesnt require a ban
Basically a well funded organization will have to engage in a multi-pronged and simultaneous approach to debilitate bitcoin, while also deterring its use in person
This pretty much requires a government sponsored entity to do
And, if I'm not mistaken, the US can sanction all foreign businesses that continue to provide these services.
The article quoting prominent economists is totally irrelevant, so it's tempting to discard the article as providing very little informative content.
[1] https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/introducing-cbei-a-new-...
Because intellectual and entertainment pursuits generally benefit society.
Selfish fucks continuously buying up an already scarce supply of specialized microchips for the sole purpose of greed isn't really comparable.
Proof-of-Work crypto has completely screwed some scientists, artists, and just everyday people who might like to just unwind after a long day. During a global pandemic.
Crypto in its current form tends to brings out the worst in us. It's kind of like social media in that regard.
>Because intellectual and entertainment pursuits generally benefit society.
The ability to conduct business under oppressive regimes in foreign countries also has value.
> Selfish fucks continuously buying up an already scarce supply of specialized microchips for the sole purpose of greed isn't really comparable.
The same happens with gamers buying up cards, and there have been shortages pre-crypto as well.
> Proof-of-Work crypto has completely screwed some scientists, artists, and just everyday people who might like to just unwind after a long day. During a global pandemic.
Why can't you entertain yourself with something that's less damaging to the environment, like watching a movie?
> Crypto in its current form tends to brings out the worst in us. It's kind of like social media in that regard.
The same could be said for the gaming community, which is saturated with misogyny and racism.
I suggest we ban gaming.
The fundamental difference is that with organic demand, people typically just want one card. With crypto, the incentive is to get your hands on as many cards as you can, fuck everyone else. Then we find ourselves in this race to the bottom.
Moreover, trying to equate the energy use of both activities is laughable when mining creates an environment where idle compute resources translate to lost profits.
I'm sure many people have taken up watching movies instead. Thing is, the net energy use is still vastly higher because mining creates a perverse incentive for virtually all GPUs to be hoarded, while drawing power 24/7.
I don't disagree that a large swath of gaming culture is a cesspool, nor do I disagree that crypto has beneficial uses. I do however think both are beyond the scope of this discussion.
What I'm saying is that the Proof-of-Work model has run amok and is a net detriment to society right now in its current incarnation.
Even so, GPU demand from gaming is satisfiable.
Mining demand only ceases once the price of the underlying instruments fall sufficiently. More mining won't necessarily make that happen.
My argument is that the mining dynamic itself is potentially insatiable and fundamentally detrimental on a societal level, whilst highly distasteful at that.
It's like advocating for a never-ending greed olympics.
It boggles my mind that your hill to die on in fighting the "never-ending greed olympics" is a tool that's predominantly used by small-time retail investors, i.e. regular people. According to your system of ethics, it's preferable to be an old-money banker that profits off of the destruction of economy, than it is to be a person using tools (cryptocurrency) designed to divest control over the economy from said profiteers. I strongly suggest you take your war on greed to Wall Street, rather than directing it at the people trying to dismantle the greedy system in the first place.
With crypto mining right now, the more GPUs you buy, the more money you make. The demand is effectively infinite.
The two dynamics couldn't be further from equivalency.
As for your boggled mind that's seemingly decoded my system of ethics and preferences, I can't really speak to war plans I've no interest in.
That said, I don't view hoarding resources as dismantling a greedy system. Two wrongs don't make a right.
>With crypto mining right now, the more GPUs you buy, the more money you make. The demand is effectively infinite.
Here, you admit that your core objection is other people have the wrong economic preferences according to you. The problem isn't the externalities, but rather the mere existence of the demand preference for GPUs. It's a page straight out of the former eastern bloc command economies.
As for your analysis that basically insinuates I'm a communist, consider how the United States government would respond to a cryptocurrency-fueled chip shortage that was negatively impacting national security.
The US is a market economy, and like in any other market economy, the solution is to increase supply rather to attack demand. This is what has been done in the past for all the other chip shortages fueled by gamers.
False. The very first comment I wrote in reply to you was unsuccessful in its attempt to steer the conversation away from energy. Still, I never mentioned the environment nor climate change.
As for greed, I never said it didn't matter. However, you did try to misrepresent my argument and frame it as some type of war with preference for old money. That you knew my goals or some such.
Since you seem focused on my motivations, here they are:
a) I find people hoarding scarce resources to be extremely selfish and in poor taste. Especially when the intended use for said resources is intellectual in nature.
b) I believe the demand placed upon the GPU market by cryptomining fundamentally differs from the demand created by gaming. The former may never be satiable, due to perverse incentives that promote greed. With the latter, a single person is typically satisfied by one GPU every two years. They're two very different dynamics.
>The US is a market economy, and like in any other market economy, the solution is to increase supply rather to attack demand.
The problem arises when manufacturers are unable to increase supply to meet demand. Sometimes it makes sense to attack frivolous demand if that demand involves the hoarding of scarce resources. Government-sanctioned rationing is not unprecedented in the United States, nor outlawing ownership.
That said, I doubt that'll ever become a reality. However, I do hope manufacturers lock down their hardware such that cryptomining is rendered inefficient. Free market solutions and such.
> The problem arises when manufacturers are unable to increase supply to meet demand. Sometimes it makes sense to attack frivolous demand if that demand involves the hoarding of scarce resources.
That's not how it works, at least not in a functioning western economy. The more GPUs they sell, the more capital they will have to ramp up production. This is precisely the reason why market economies don't suffer from long-term structural supply shortages that plague command economies.
Not just gaming: science, art, engineering. If the supply was scarce enough, gaming itself would take a lower priority to those.
>That's not how it works, at least not in a functioning western economy. The more GPUs they sell, the more capital they will have to ramp up production.
Supply is low and demand is skyrocketing. Cryptomining just makes availability of what little supply there is even more miserable. It wouldn't be unreasonable for cryptomining to be treated as a sink for GPU surplus, rather than the current sordid state of affairs.
Whereas the bitcoin has no utility versus already existing fiat currency, except for the one to prevent any governmental fine tuning on the economics (by decentralizing).
This fine tuning is notably required for, e.g., environmental issues, energy reforms, social support... or just for the government to work at all, deciding budgets, create laws and organize the society.
Wanting to not participate in that in order to increase own's wealth is just wrong, and even wronger when you do that by monopolizing all of the planet's energy.
As to "reducing availability": when was this electricity shortage caused by bitcoin miners?
It's astounding how easy it is to wage FUD and mis-information campaigns. Someone come up with this utterly idiotic argument of Bitcoin energy usage, it was picked up by the press, mindlessly repeated by people not willing to spend even few minutes dissecting it and now you can't have a HN article about Bitcoin without endless repetitions of this specious argument, which perpetuates it even more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_ethanol
Corn ethanol is ethanol produced from corn biomass and is the main source of ethanol fuel in the United States. Approximately 25% of U.S. corn croplands are used for ethanol production.
...
Since 2001, corn ethanol production has increased by more than seven times. [In] 2018, out of 14.62 billions of bushels of corn produced, 5.60 billions of bushels were used to produce corn ethanol, reported by the United States Department of Energy.
1. As real US infrastructure and capacity continues to crumble, the government could become less and less effective in its enforcements. As an extreme example (first hand) you won't find police on the roads in Honduras or in El Salvador, not because there are no traffic laws, but because the governments are helpless.
2. Big banks actually want Bitcoin. They are smart enough to see past the end of the dollar ponzi scheme, and they aren't concerned with optics or with election cycles.
I personally think it would be a great idea for the whales to grant each US senator 300 Bitcoin, and each congressman 100 Bitcoin in recognition of their excellent service to the people of the United States.
It would hardly be the first time some special interest tried to bribe the government for favorable treatment. I think to succeed you need to be a bit more subtle these days.
Ahaha. Citation needed, extra-ordinary claims etc.
All I've seen is that banks want a cut of people's transaction fees, and don't really care what the transaction is about. Banks make money on transaction fees, so yeah. That's not even the same as the first part, "banks want Bitcoin".