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Comment by impostervt | Hacker News Reader

This is one of those ideas that may sound good in theory, but will be impossible to apply fairly. There are many "meme" coins that are now dedicating a portion of each transaction towards charity - saving apes, funding animal shelters, etc. Is that enough utility? And there are plenty of ERC20 tokens that are not meme coins that, debatable, serve no real purpose except to enrich their creators and early investors.

And while I'm no fan of NFTs, they seem as to have as much inherit value as any piece of art (whatever someone is willing to pay).

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I tend to look at charity (especially in small coins which suck up a bunch of electricity for basically no gain for anyone) as an excuse to validate their existence. Just because TOMS give a pair of shoes to a poor person every time you buy a pair doesn't automatically make TOMS a good company, it just means it has dope ass marketing.

Actually, it makes TOMS a bad company, because this program inadvertently put people out of business by flooding markets with free shoes.

How does a coin suck up energy? Aren't most of them just ERC20 tokens on the ethereum block chain? Operating the Ethereum network with an additional token doesn't use any more energy.

In the US it's illegal to print your own currency and use it for commercial purposes. This doesn't preclude the ability to legally exchange goods in a foreign currency because, while there may be a whole lot of potential currencies, it's not that difficult to create an allowlist of approved currencies.

I personally think this is a pretty stupid decision, but iit should be pretty easy to fairly apply so long as the Thai SEC lays out clear guidelines on which currencies are approved.

And, I am avoiding making any sort of comment on whether currencies are worthy of being on that approved list. It's Thailand and the sovereign government has the right to make currency regulation decisions as arbitrarily as it wants.

> In the US it's illegal to print your own currency and use it for commercial purposes.

You can't make people accept your own currency, but you can print it and use it for commercial purposes if people want to accept it.

There are plenty of private currencies in the U.S [1]. Printing them and using them are just fine as along as A) you do not attempt to pass it off as Federal currency and B) you do not refused to accept renumeration in Federal currency (the "for all debts, public and private" part) without pre-stated agreement. We agree you will mow my lawn and I will pay you 50 Disney Dollars, that is fair and legal. That said, the person doing the mowing the law owes income tax on the fair market value of the Disney Dollars.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_community_currencies_i...

Here in New Zealand the notorious gang Mongrel Mob donates significant portions of their ill gotten gains to charity. Most of us still want them gone.

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