Crypto Is Forbidden for Muslims, Indonesia’s National Religious Council Rules | Hacker News Reader

Crypto Is Forbidden for Muslims, Indonesia’s National Religious Council Rules

finance.yahoo.com

15 pointsdave_aiello10 comments

> The National Ulema Council, or MUI, has deemed cryptocurrency as haram, or banned, as it has elements of uncertainty, wagering and harm, Asrorun Niam Sholeh, head of religious decrees, said on Thursday after the council held an expert hearing. If cryptocurrency as a commodity or digital asset can abide by Shariah tenets and can show a clear benefit, then it can be traded, he added.

I sense a business opportunity for a cryptocurrency that abides by Shariah tenets.

That is disappointing. Hard cryptoassets could stabilize their Currency. Did you know that the smallest unit of Bitcoin, the satoshi, is worth 11 Indonesian Rupiah. You could switch to using it for the unit of account today and no longer lose your purchasing power of the rupiah going forward.

By what definition of "hard" is Bitcoin hard?

There will only ever be 2.1 quadrillion satoshi, as a fixed cap. The continued emission of new coins are currently distributed at 625 million satoshi every 10 minutes to miners. This process continues until Feb 2140, with the emission halving every 4 years. Hardest money on the planet.

That's not the commonly-used definition then. A "hard" asset is something that has intrinsic value: they can be used to produce something else, or they are themselves a consumable good that can be sold.

Hard doesn't mean "finite supply" or "price probably won't go down".

The intrinsic value is a property of the mining effort, the decentralized peer to peer censorship resistant ledger and the full faith in the inability to inflate the monetary base. Many consider Bitcoin to be the hardest money ever created.

A house is valuable because you can live in it (intrinsic). A Bitcoin is valuable because only you control it, it cannot be confiscated, it cannot be censored, and others will always be willing to buy it from you. The day will come when nobody sells their Bitcoin. Why on earth would you trade the hardest asset for a softer one (Greshams Law) — unless your personal requirements needed that asset for other purposes (personal preference).

> A Bitcoin is valuable because only you control it, it cannot be confiscated, it cannot be censored, and others will always be willing to buy it from you.

Again, you're not using the widely accepted definition of "hard". None of those qualities give you any ability to produce a new good. None of them mean anything if the price of Bitcoin crashes.

If the housing market crashes, I can still live in my house. If the Bitcoin market crashes, I can either sell my Bitcoin (and realize a huge amount of lost value) or maybe I can't, and then it has no value. It's just a string of characters in the end.

Also, many Bitcoins are censored. The large exchanges have blacklists of Bitcoins that they won't trade due to their involvement in criminal activity.

You can certainly find someone willing to buy them, but if most people are on exchanges that comply with the blacklist, your coins are much less liquid and much less valuable.

Even worse: Bitcoin will always be vulnerable to 51% attacks, which means I could lose any number of Bitcoin.

> The day will come when nobody sells their Bitcoin. Why on earth would you trade the hardest asset for a softer one (Greshams Law) — unless your personal requirements needed that asset for other purposes (personal preference).

This sounds like satire. What's the point of any asset that you never sell? It's literally useless -- a way to lock up and bury value.

I don’t agree with your interpretation of this definition. Gold is considered hard money, yet it is only a shiny rock. It is indeed the supply, ability to debase and store of value over time that makes it a hard asset.

It certainly is not satire. I believe what I wrote with great passion. I’d rather take a 51% risk (which… is not credible for many many years now) than a 100% risk my dollars are going to 0.

I agree about the fungability risk. Yes chain analytics is a thing. But it won’t be forever. Some UTXOs are bad. Not Surprisingly, enterprising folks have used various techniques to get around this. There is no mainnet filter on chain tho — a dirty utxo is as fungible as a Coinbase reward. It’s the centralized ecosystem that isn’t.

It's not my interpretation. It's the definition used by everyone in finance and accounting.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hard_asset.asp

Intangible assets cannot be "hard".

Also, gold is not just a shiny rock. It can be made into electronic components, food, art, jewelry, and a huge variety of industrially-useful alloys.

> Gold is considered hard money, yet it is only a shiny rock

Despite its traditional value, gold is not only a shiny rock, it is an useful material in itself (it is not only used for jewelry).

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