Joseph Stiglitz: 'We should shut down the cryptocurrencies' | Hacker News Reader

Joseph Stiglitz: 'We should shut down the cryptocurrencies'

cnbc.com

74 pointsTomte170 comments

> He worries that they enable illicit activity by making money transactions less transparent. Still, he sees the value in digital payments systems and supports electronic use of government-backed currencies like the dollar.

> “I’ve been a great advocate of moving to an electronic payments mechanism. There are a lot of efficiencies. I think we can actually have a better regulated economy if we had all the data in real time, knowing what people are spending,” he says.

This is almost written like a parody. Government backed electronic money is utterly dystopian to me. Imagine all the "nudges" that could easily be introduced. You're buying too much [bad thing], card declined. You're costing the health care system too much by being overweight so we'll restrict your food allowance. Your carbon emissions are over the limit this month, we'll have to deny your flight purchase. A gas station charges "too much" for gas, payment declined.

I'm afraid that's exactly how it's gonna turn out.

With natural monopolies like those promoted by the network effects crypto projects pin their hopes on the stable point is the same, minus democratic institutions ensuring some semblance of justice and equity.

I'm pretty sure is more about money laundering than that.

And the security theatre in airports is more about terrorism. And not letting you pass that sunscreen bottle is about liquid bombs... There will always be a "reason" for the government to gain control over citizens.

They'll never get it man.

They want to government up their a$$.

That's why I no longer argue with them, not as much as I used to.

Every successful, cool and relaxed person Ive known in real life is against all of this shit.

99% of retail payments already happen through a tightly regulated electronic payment system today.

I haven't been denied my god given right to murder myself by purchasing tobacco and sugar products so far.

> I haven't been denied my god given right to murder myself by purchasing tobacco and sugar products so far.

The past does not predict the future

Sure, but that doesn't mean the past doesn't have any predictive value.

The past has absolutely no predictive value. Thats why we have a news business in the first place.

Yes but that data is fragmented, not on a giant immutable ledger.

It's not that fragmented. Visa, Mastercard, and if you're being completionist, Amex and Discover. Four taps gets you virtually every credit card transaction in the Western world. Direct bank transfers are even more susceptible.

And cash! :)

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/credit-card-...

The future for tobacco products is looking pretty bleak. In MA, now I can only buy juul 3%, no menthol or any other flavor, even worse than in CA. Besides, it costs as much as groceries now.

Good! I know more people who desperately want to quit and can’t due to addiction than I do people who love tobacco and can quit anytime.

Hopefully you have the same attitude when the sin tax comes for your vices, I suppose

Do you think prohibition has a particularly effective track record?

Also, since obesity is the biggest health problem in the US, we can easily use this argument to limit caloric intake "for the greater good™". After all, what is the argument against limiting caloric intake if we should all be policing what humans put into their bodies?

Because you can still use cash.

But once you can't, then the temptation to coerce people into "the right way" is going to be too big.

Then you need to hope you don't need to go to a gay bar in an anti gay state, pay for an abortion without your parent knowing, or give financial support to a controversial political group.

So the problem isn’t the existence of a USD digital system.

The issue would only arise if cash was eliminated.

I completely agree on the need for cash, but as long as we’re also keeping cash a digital USD would solve every problem crypto claims to solve while still allowing for a non dystopian future.

In fact, crypto is completely dystopian because there is absolutely no space for cash in it, and further, by being distributed and therefore pseudonymous at best, it actually opens massive privacy and security pandora boxes.

Oh, I though it was the idea to go full electronic.

Then yes, a perfect ledger for all monetary transactions would be great, espacially for big sums.

Appart from that, the current financial system is mostly digital and satisfactory for day to day payments.

> In fact, crypto is completely dystopian because there is absolutely no space for cash in it, and further, by being distributed and therefore pseudonymous at best, it actually opens massive privacy and security pandora boxes.

Is this true of all coins though? I know little about crypto, but I gather from reading on here while the privacy of bitcoin was greatly exaggerated/false other coins use actually privacy respecting schemes. Of course, that would assume that the schemes they use work perfectly which is probably a ridiculous assumption.

I don't think crypto positions itself as the only option (Bitcoin maxis aside). So there is definitely space for cash, space for tokenized USD, space for collateralized algo stablecoins.

Why distributed implies "pseudonimous at best"? Have you looked into what can be done with zero-knowledge proofs? With MPC?

There's already been government attempts in restricting banking services to "undesirables", all under the guise of preventing "high-risk activity". Check out Operation Choke Point. It prevented a lot of legal sex workers from being able to use banking services. It's a kind of extra-judicial regulation where something is "legal" but not really because some agency can arbitrarily tell every banking provider to blacklist you.

Competence is a big part of why you don't see as many nudges as you can, but it'll be considerably easier with a digitized US coin. And of course these departments get more sophisticated over time. Maybe they'll hire consultants from CCP to help them implement a social credit score.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point

Reading that wiki, nothing jumped out to me as unreasonable - at least the goal of Choke Point. What's wrong with targeting industries with high risk/incidence of money laundering?

Is there high incidence of money laundering in sex work? If there is, then it's not exempt from being investigated. This isn't a reflection on the act of sex work but the shady characters using it as a laundering mechanism.

It's about the implementation. I believe something should be illegal or legal. If it's legal all the same rights and services should be granted to individuals in this trade. Fraud and charge backs should be handled by the services processors and new services should arise to handle higher risk industries. Better than the state putting their finger on the scales

https://www.vice.com/en/article/4w74jg/how-the-financial-sec...

A ton of gun stores lost their banking access as a result of this. Bank of America, IIRC, dropped a bunch of retailers with no notice.

It’s definitely seen in that community as a back-door attempt to abrogate access to firearms.

It's really screwed up, most of the people I know who go fucked over were LGS owners and employees, like they weren't already having a hard enough time staying in business. You know, the kind of people who can actually help create a community of safe, responsible firearms use with their trainings outreach efforts etc.

I agree but I actually wouldn't mind if carbon emissions and offsets were tracked and ensured to be not too negative. There are easier ways to do that though - e.g. just include money for offseting in the flight price.

> carbon emissions and offsets were tracked and ensured to be not too negative

including big exceptions for politicians who have no problem taking a plane every 2 days for no reason.

No, no, no need for that. It is an expense the tax payer pays for anyway. So no reason for exception for politicians

It’s even simpler than that - slap the carbon tax on the carbon source at time of extraction if it’s domestic, or at import time if it’s from a country that doesn’t do that itself at the same rate. The price changes will all flow downstream from there, and we don’t have a hairball of exemptions for eg jet fuel. And very pessimistic taxation estimates for materials and finished products from countries that don’t follow suit.

Yeah, but everything has to be progressive. We can't reduce emissions by taxing EVERYONE to reduce emissions. We have to try to squeeze 76% of the reductions from the top 1%.

The problem is - if you ACTUALLY want to do something about emissions - they aren't as unevenly distributed as wealth. Everyone needs to cut back. And just like taxes - everyone is willing to raise taxes on someone else. Everyone is willing to force everyone else to cut their emissions. Hardly anyone wants their own taxes to go up, or reduce their own emissions.

Is that first sentence sarcastic? Anyway, these tax proposals are usually accompanied by an evenly distributed dividend that makes them revenue neutral. The net effect is that people who live close to work, don't fly, don't eat lots of produce from the other hemisphere, etc should be net gainers, and everyone else will pay more. In most categories, the rich will probably end up paying more on average, since they consume more.

No - that's the one it seems economists recommend.

Politicians go with what panders to their base, not with what economists recommend.

Yeah, fair enough, I see what you meant in your other comment.

Give everyone a fixed amount of money if you want to make this more progressive than it is naturally (poor people emit less carbon already).

> Imagine all the "nudges" that could easily be introduced. You're buying too much [bad thing], card declined. You're costing the health care system too much by being overweight so we'll restrict your food allowance. Your carbon emissions are over the limit this month, we'll have to deny your flight purchase. A gas station charges "too much" for gas, payment declined.

Why would they do this when they can (and already do) use taxes and tax breaks to dis/incentivize behavior?

> Why would they do this when they can (and already do) use taxes and tax breaks to dis/incentivize behavior?

Because they can. You have never heard of government abuse before?

The dis/incentive aspect is already abused, imo. If a small percentage of society participates in one activity, eg. smoking, it's too easy for the majority to tax the crap out of them to fund whatever activities they want.

I'm really not sure invoking smoking as your boogeyman here is making the point you want it to. It's already very well known that the reason it remained unrestricted for so long is because the tobacco giants actively suppressed the studies that clearly showed how deadly it was, both for smokers and for the people around them.

I don't think using something like sin taxes to discourage doing something that actively harms both you and anyone who has to share your air can reasonably be called an abuse of government power, unless you're one of the people who thinks that anything (besides maybe enforcing property rights) is an abuse of government power.

You're missing the point. It's too easy for the majority to support taxing the minority over anything like this, cause it's no skin off their back. [Not to mention there are already laws pretty much everywhere restricting smoking to places where secondhand smoke isn't an issue- people can smoke at home you know. If you are worried about air quality, then driving in the city should be taxed, but it wouldn't be b/c the majority does it regularly]

There's a massive difference between taxing something like "being black" or "renting an apartment", where it's either an immutable part of who you are or something very difficult for many to change due to something like socioeconomic status, and something like smoking, which, while yes, it's addictive, is still a choice.

And, again, it's a choice that is actively harmful to the smoker and everyone around them. So if you really want to make a point, I strongly encourage you to find a different example, because this one just sounds like you're a smoker who's angry that they have to pay more in taxes to continue to be able to pollute the air with carcinogens.

The point is people support taxing whatever is convenient for them. Another of the many conforming effects of overgrown democracy.

If you can show an actual example of that, rather than an example of people taxing objectively negative behaviour in an attempt to reduce it, then I might take your point more seriously.

In countries with socialized health care, the high tax on tobacco does not cover the costs of treating cancer patients : https://www.science-environnement.com/modes-de-vie/les-taxes...

It's a mistake to believe the tax is here to fund "whatever activities"

I've seen reports like this from anti-smoking campaigns before. It's hilarious they don't account for the estimated costs of treating those dead patients had they lived to old age. Calling BS on that one.

This just sounds like punishing people, not incentivizing. People just want to see others punished, they would never want to use such a system themselves.

A lot already happens, from a super complicated tax code and things like cities banning fountain drinks above a certain size. But a lot of these things are not practical. I don't know if we have the legal infrastructure to mandate gas may not be sold above a certain amount. Now do that with millions of business, many of them too small.

Digital currency is a general solution for absolute control. It's much easier to control and impose and change arbitrary rules on spending or target individuals solely through the administrative state. No laws have to be passed, no congressional hearings, no one you can vote out of office. Just a single bureaucrat you've never heard of flipping a switch and upending your life.

Still, why wouldn’t they?

I find it alarming how authoritarianism and totalitarianism are perfectly acceptable views if people work in particular academic and political circles and mask it in the 'better regulation', 'better government' or other pro-government sentiment. It feels like a whole section of society is trying to shoehorn in a fully regulated society by playing coy and fooling large portions of society at large into believing it's going to be to their benefit by not being completely honest with the implications and historical outcomes of a totalitarian state.

This has been pushed with every hot-button topic, every tragedy, at every opportunity. What boggles my mind even more is how many people seem perfectly willing to step right in line and accept it.

We live in a totalitarian state that's managed by corporations. In true American style, we outsource all of the things you just mentioned to the private sector, but they still very much happen just the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism

If you are smart, there is a strong temptation to start telling everyone how to behave, because they are, like, less smart, and do stupid and dangerous things. These simpletons should do what we, the smart bunch, say, for their own good!

In some ancient books this is called hubris. It's a very real danger in any human interaction.

A lot of academics honestly believe in the idea that we're smart enough now to do it better. I work periodically with one academic who wrote a recent book published by Harvard University Press on the history of German censorship prior to 1945 (and she has relatives who were killed in the Holocaust), and yet who is still a firm believer in current initiatives to censor the Internet to address harmful content.

This "we're smarter now" is a kind of perpetual Achilles heel of academics dealing in policy. e.g., Chinese academics thought they were smarter now too just prior to the cultural revolution, and that they'd be able to steer the tiger they created in the students. They weren't, of course, and many of those academics ended up being targets.

We're smarter now, but apparently not smart enough to realize that "smarts" don't make for a terribly effective countermeasure to being persecuted for disagreeing with those in power.

> authoritarianism and totalitarianism are perfectly acceptable views if people work in particular academic and political circles and mask it in the 'better regulation'

Or, just to be devils advocate, maybe people just want better regulation and not authoritarianism or totalitarianism.

Most people are pretty rational about these things I think and can spot 'problems' a mile away A

Private Corps and Legislators tend to sometimes push things too far, or miss the 'dark side' etc..

Davos have been pushing individual carbon trackers. "reached carbon quota.. access to flight/bus/car..denied!

There’s 141 trillion of wealth in the US. 2 trillion is in currency. We already have digital money it’s called the US Dollar.

"Economists want real time data" --> "They are controlling our toughts!"

1) Please - enough with they hyperbole.

Data is not the same as control.

Yes - we should be wary, we don't want the government using our money to nudge us.

At the same time we definitely want our governments using data to help us.

There was a story in Canada about the government buying anonymoized cell tower data to understand our behaviours during a pandemic, misrepresented as 'they are trying to control us' - which is a disingenuous lie.

Literally we're faced with a pandemic, we want to get rid of restrictions, the best way to do that is to know where and how COVID is spreading. We wouldn't bat an eye if some garbage advertising company bought that data.

2) "Government backed electronic money is utterly dystopian to me. I"

Hyerbole.

You already use 'Government Backed Electronic Money' - that the way it works and it works fine.

It's 1000% better than 'Ponzi Scheme Money 80% Owned by Elon Musk' or 'Google Controlled Money'.

And FYI - the 'Government Backed Money' we use today flows through VISA network and they are 100% selling every bit of your data to anyone who will buy.

What you probably want is even stronger regulation of 'Gov Money' so that private entities cannot trace, transact or sell, i.e. even better privacy laws.

And maybe some kind of legislation that forbids the Central Bank from doing anything other than targeting inflation/employment.

>At the same time we definitely want our governments using data to help us.

Speak for yourself, until the government shows it can be trusted. Their track record is awful, no thanks.

Again, hyperbolic nonsense.

Your government has millions of people working for it that do innumerable things from water works, electricity distribution and regulation, policing, defence.

You already depend on them intimately.

The naive, glib view that somehow 'we can't trust government' is blatantly contradicted by your very existed.

We want to make sure oversight and controls are there, but it's bonkers to suggest we don't want health officials to understand how this pandemic played out, so that they can figure out how to deal with the next one.

You have declined to get a credit or debit card, I suppose? If not, you may want to check out the data a “Level 3” transactor provides regarding your purchases. Data the card company subsequently sells to insurance companies, etc. Tip: pay for your “sin” purchases with cash.

https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/just-say-no-to-cbdcs

Government backed and transparent doesn’t mean all my purchases are exposed. It’s (technically) possible to have a system of tokens where it’s only known how much I spend for example, but not where. Having (say) transactions under $1000 or $10000 anonymous would make a lot of sense as a cash replacement.

I would prefer something like GNU Taler over any cryptocurrency.

"He worries that they enable illicit activity by making money transactions less transparent."

I always have to prefix that I'm no fan of crypto, don't own any, never have, but this seems like a shill to me, and brazenly opposite to reality.

Blockchains show every transaction ever, to everyone, albeit the transactees are pseudonymous.

But the traditional system is totally opaque to most people. And even to government, when complex webs of tax-haven shell-companies are involved (unless records are leaked, as in the panama papers, etc). So billionaires, mafia groups, corrupt government, get away with all kinds shenanighans, because the transactions themselves are secret.

The complete opposite of what Stiglitz is arguing.

Level 2 chains don’t generally put everything back on the main chain. Lightning, for example, is peer to peer, and then only does net settlement to the main blockchain very infrequently (maybe after a couple months of transactions). This also makes it vastly more energy efficient on a per-transaction basis, the marginal energy cost of a transaction can approach zero. But also, my understanding is that the transaction history isn’t really preserved in a format that would be easy for a government to put together after the fact.

Going further, some L1 chains claim to be anonymous not pseudonymous. Whether that is or remains true depends on the crypto(graphy).

Happy to see all this discussion on HN.

> they enable illicit activity by making money transactions less transparent

Given how the most heinous economic crimes of this century were done in official ceremony in broad daylight , maybe there is value to it.

Academics are known in general for their controlling nature

You say that because we know about it because it's transparent. We don't prosecute every crime but we can get some of them and we can deter a lot of them. If you've ever worked at a financial firm they are typically extremely rigorous about compliance.

I mean, the public democratic decisions about finance may be catastrophic. People should have a recourse from the mismanagement of central governments. That's what other currencies do . I don't see why we should not have that optionality

We do. It's called voting. The redress you want is from voting citizens who disagree with you. And crypto doesn't solve that at all.

it does

This is just pure evil. There is no "we". It's mind-boggling how some economists have become complete puppets for governments. He is just straight up lying in most of his arguments.

Economic inefficiency is a problem of the current monetary system, caused by its centralization and inflationary nature, and this is the problem which bitcoin is trying to fix. Most of the issues in the world today are caused by our current monetary system, from wealth inequality to consumerism and environmental problems.

He is suggesting that the monetary system should be even more centralized, and we should move into even more centrally planned economy, like in Soviet Union. This time however, they're planning to use big data to solve the economic calculation problem and to control consumer behavior. This is completely immoral, and ends up destroying both personal and economic freedoms in a society. This problem is very well understood, and no one seriously suggests central planning unless they are evil and want to decrease freedom and equality in a society.

We already have too much central planning in our current system. Central bank digital currencies would be the last step in this process of completely monopolizing money, and giving governments and central banks the absolute authority of where money is invested and how it is spent.

I don't see any wrong in what he says. So, crypto is designed for a future where all the institutional banking fails and where political borders don't exist and where no transparency is required. All that it offers is less fee and speed. First of all such future dreamed by the cypto pundits doesn't exist. And many people don't mind paying a little commission to a bank doing my payment, so that they can call the bank and hold it accountable. All this is taken away in the crypto model just for the sake of avoiding a small fee and delay. How many times does an average person transacts across border for which their fiat currency doesn't work or too difficult to use? crypto has too little to offer at the cost of enabling crime and lack of transparency. Why all this is so difficult to understand for these crypto geniuses?

You have missed the point of Bitcoin. It's not just a payment network, it's a completely new type of money. It can't be inflated, it can't be taken away from you, and no one can stop anyone from using it. It's the opposite of our current, inflationary and centrally controlled money. Bitcoin can take away these authoritarian and repressive powers from governments and central banks.

It's not really possible to understand Bitcoin if you don't know how broken our current money is and how much damage it has caused.

This website collects stats from the beginning of purely fiat monetary system. https://wtfhappenedin1971.com

> it can't be taken away from you

Eh? Almost every single day we see a HN headline where a rugpull, hack, or other scam has taken vast amounts of bitcoin away from owners.

Not bitcoin. You are talking about altcoins or "cryptos" which are all scams.

Obviously bitcoin is not resistant to your own stupidity. If you send your bitcoin to a scammer, it's your own fault. However, if you're careful and manage your security well, it is impossible to confiscate.

> Most of the issues in the world today are caused by our current monetary system, from wealth inequality to consumerism and environmental problems.

Of those three points, consumerism is the only one that bitcoin fixes, as it’s nigh useless as a currency right now, but excels at concentrating wealth[0] and burning carbon.

[0] 0.04% own 63% of bitcoin; 2% own 94% https://medium.com/coinmonks/bitcoin-and-the-concentration-o...

It doesn't concentrate wealth, because it's a zero-sum game. The only way to acquire bitcoin is to be productive and contribute to society. Otherwise, they'll have to spend their bitcoin. Fiat monetary system, on the other hand, allows creating more money for those who are already wealthy, i.e. wealth is constantly transferred from the poor to the rich.

Consumerism is caused by forced spending and growth through inflation. People who spend less are punished.

The article you linked looks just at bitcoin addresses, which is wildly inaccurate method, because it's possible to create infinite amount of addresses. In addition, it's impossible to know how many people are behind those big addresses which belong to exchanges, investment funds, nation states and so forth. This article[0] is more accurate, and puts the number at 2% of entities own 71.5% of bitcoin, where entities could still be multiple people.

[0] https://insights.glassnode.com/bitcoin-supply-distribution/

> The only way to acquire bitcoin is to be productive and contribute to society

This actually made me laugh.

Not sure what are you laughing at. It's the nature of hard money, like bitcoin and gold. Their production cost is close to their market value, which means that you can acquire them only by mining or by trade, which both require work. No one can profit by creating them from thin air, like fiat money.

Literally all you have to do is invent a new coin.

Also - to acquire Bitcoin: https://xkcd.com/538/

Good luck trying to sell your coin to bitcoiners.

If you're trying to imply that no one who holds Bitcoin would sell to buy other coins, then I think your view of Bitcoiners may need to be recalibrated.

https://www.reddit.com/r/terraluna/comments/rs8hfv/how_to_bu...

Why do you think that creating a new coin and trying to sell it is the easiest way to get bitcoin? Most people think that it's not very easy, and buy bitcoin from an exchange.

So it is very accurate to say 5% of the actual bitcoin participants—a very small number of people—own a supermajority of the currency, that the 8 billion of us are to share.

Brilliant.

All of them are not individuals, and similar power law distribution applies to all kinds of wealth.

In 2011 I expected that governments will eventually try do shutdown Bitcoin and that these attempts will ultimately fail, because it would require most governments to tightly collaborate, which I think will not work out, because of conflicting incentives. Everything is taking much longer than I anticipated...

And he likes this kind of surveillance dystopia? Is he trying to sell us CBDCs?

It does not require most governments to collaborate. It would require one government, the one where most users of this site are from.

The actual banning of use of cryptocurrenties is irrelevant, the fiat exchange point is completely bannable.

I don't think that a US ban would successfully shut down crypto. Not even a simultaneous US, EU, Russia and China ban. BTC price may adjust accordingly though.

> the fiat exchange point is completely bannable.

So are drug trades, but the global illegal drug trafficking market is worth about half a trillion dollars.

Somebody needs to explain to me how a government could successfully shut down Bitcoin because I'm incredibly confused when people suggest this.

You can't stop people from meeting in person and trading things amongst themselves with cash. Banning cryptocurrency would require the same effort that would be needed to ban drugs and last time I checked the illegal drug market is huge even in countries where there's legal access. How will cryptocurrency be any easier to ban?

"Man who benefits enormously from status quo worried about change"

How would Dr. Stiglitz be affected by change?

He wouldn't, that is why he favors it. He has nothing to lose with such a proposal, no Skin in the Game.

No one is using crypto to facilitate legal payments in any meaningful volume. The only people who have something to lose is those who are using crypto to avoid government and regulations around AML and KYC or those getting wealthy in the ponzi.

No one is using crypto for payments yet because the infrastructure is still expensive and not a viable alternative.

There are plenty of use-cases where using crypto can be a better alternative for merchants (no risk of fraud and chargebacks) and consumers (micropayments where the cost of CC processing is higher than the cost of fraud, or purchases where the payee values privacy above all else - think "Ashley Madison" subscribers who'd rather not have their names on the site)

Check in next year when FedNow instant payments are live, and you can move up to USD $500k ($25k at initial launch, increasing over time as the system shakes out) at a time for 5 cents per transfer. It is currently in preprod, and being actively tested between hundreds of banks and financial services firms.

https://www.moderntreasury.com/learn/what-is-fednow

https://frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/community/...

https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/08/31/fednow-the-federa...

Right, because as long as the USA has a system for them, all is good for everyone else in the world. /s

Anyway, even FedNow is not enough. Europe has SEPA, Brazil has Pix. India has NPCI... and yet, they still haven't solved the side for micropayments and transactions still can be reversed and are not anonymous.

Anonymous digital payments cannot coexist with government KYC and AML regulatory requirements. You're asking to solve for violating financial regulatory mechanisms with technology. It's a data privacy and governance issue.

Perhaps you use some sort of fiat tumbler like privacy.com enabled for instant payments, where the merchant doesn't know who you are, but the money transmitter will still be required to keep records of the transaction and have a license.

(disclosure: i work in risk/compliance at a fintech)

And pretty much like every over-reaching policy, it will be circumvented by the bad actors and be used to oppress law-abiding people and to keep the status quo.

Still, crypto could be used for the payment and KYC be done through other means.

> ...and transactions still can be reversed...

That's a feature. I have no idea why people think irreversible transactions are a desirable feature. It's like a credit card where you're responsible for all charges, even if your card was stolen.

not for the merchant.

> not for the merchant.

So:

1. Bad for consumers (who merchants also are).

2. Bad for people who make mistakes.

3. Good for merchants-as-merchants, including unscrupulous ones.

4. Good for thieves.

Merchants are also consumers. Reversible transactions are an important feature for everybody.

> I have no idea why people think irreversible transactions are a desirable feature.

Reversible transactions come at a cost. There are times when the cost of the insurance from the transactions being reversible is higher than the cost of the transaction itself. For those times, it would be very desirable to have a way for irreversible transactions.

(Also, please read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31463534 before continuing with any other false dichotomies. I am tired of "playing the tape" in regards to crypto discussions)

I prefer my economics analysis to come from people who don't have skin in the game either way.

Every analyst is recommending one choice, one way or another. "Not taking an action" is a choice. "Shutting down cryptocurrency" is a choice to shut out a bunch of people who can not participate in the current system.

The big issue is in finding out the upsides and the downsides of each of these choices, and who should pay for the consequences if the actions backfire. This is why we should ask for those analysts to actually put some Skin in the Game.

No if they have skin in the game they inherently want you to buy into whatever they have done creating an analysis that is flawed and intended to sell you.

As long as the sellers are exposed to the consequences of being wrong, I don't see anything wrong with it.

I'd rather have an expert saying "I am so convinced of my opinion that I'm willing to risk facing ruin over it" than some academic guiding the implementation of key policies as large-scale experiments, where the population has no other choice but "trust the experts" and see these very same experts walking away scot-free when their ideas blows up in the face of reality.

How does he benefit from status quo?

He’s a high priest of the economics cult.

Oh no, I'm part of a cult? Somebody please help me get out of this cult.

So? How are high priests of the economics cult negatively affected by crypto? It seems like if anybody didn't care, it would be them. In fact, it opens new fields of study for them.

There will be a lot of "We should shut down the cryptocurrencies" from different perspectives (combatting crime being one) before it actually happens. But it will likely happen, starting with the US and the EU when it becomes a perceived threat to fiscal policies or national strategic interests, whichever comes first. Within 20 years is my guess, but could be much sooner. What the fallout and consequences will be is harder to predict.

I could be wrong of course, some anomaly might be buried here. But almost a lifetime of experience tells me the state structures will protect their interests when threatened. And this has the potential to be such a threat at a certain scale.

Some countries will embrace bitcoin, just like some individuals will. Those who embrace it first, will benefit the most.

I think this will be the great divide for this century. Countries with hard money standard and free market economy vs. countries with inflationary money and centrally planned economy. Everyone has to pick their side.

Knowing about every little thing people buy is as creepy as knowing about every little thing people say. And it's not necessary in the least. There are valid ways to measure cash flows without tracking every individual dollar. In the end cryptocurrencies play a similar role as gold and diamonds; not a great investment but useful as a store of value.

That's not what he's saying. This isn't for monitoring individual behavior but rather macro trends. We could, for example, provide precise real-time data on metrics like inflation so we could craft better policy faster.

Payment providers are already selling this information for marketing purposes. I'm sure policy makers and central banks could already get much more detailed insights if they want to.

Perhaps. But considering people are already publishing their payments and thoughts on the internet in a constant stream of mediocre mental vomit, I doubt that besides advertisement agencies anything really changes if it was done at a different level.

The information availability might change mostly in areas where people are actively trying to hide (regardless if that's for good or bad reasons), but considering the size of that niche (ironically, perhaps also just a 1% of the masses) I doubt the significance of such a change.

Perhaps the worst part about this authoritarian train of thought is that we think these things won't happen if we simply voice our opinion. History, including recent one, shows that "elites" will suddenly shove things down people's throat, passing bills against the vast consensus.

I just don't see how a centrally-controlled digital currency can guarantee privacy.

Crypto is an idea that arose for a good reason, but it's not a long-term solution.

CBDCs are coming though to most countries, including the US (eventually). It's unstoppable.

> "We should shut down the cryptocurrencies."

You can't "shutdown" crypto currencies. Technically not possible. Anyone who believes otherwise does not understand crypto currencies.

Eh, if you made it illegal for banks to transact with crypto exchanges, you could make it a lot less useful.

Or even just apply the regulations transitively to banks, exchanges, and money transmitters (i.e. they can only transact with their crypto equivalents that follow the same regulations).

Operative word being if.

Maybe not technically but if the US or EU would ban any business activities related to crypto currencies, the entire ecosystem would collapse. Even if they continue to exist for black market purposes, their real-world usefulness would decline substantially.

> Maybe not technically but if the US or EU would ban any business activities related to crypto currencies, the entire ecosystem would collapse.

You won't be able to track people who have and use crypto if the people who use it do it correctly.

> Even if they continue to exist for black market purposes, their real-world usefulness would decline substantially.

I'll agree with you there, but I do not believe most governments will legislate a full ban.

Good luck when USG helicopter raids you.

If done correctly, the government won't be able to link your identity with your crypto.

So who is that USG helicopter raiding if they do not know who has the crypto?

"We should shut down a system where everyone can see all transactions because its not transparent, what we really need is a way for the government to track everyone."

> He worries that they enable illicit activity by making money transactions less transparent.

Oh so you are also against cash? By the way is he even aware of the concept of open ledger?

@dang this should have a (2019) appended to it.

Note the ways in which he uses the word "we". Very mendacious

I completely agree. But only so long as the integrity and privacy is upheld (which is very much possible). The state should now how much I earn and from where, and also how much I spend but not necessarily on what.

Anonymous small transactions on a centralized government currency would be a step up from what I do today with 99.999 (or thereabout) transactions being card/digital through systems I trust much less than my government.

I’m not a BTC maximalist but I am a fiat currency minimalist.

We should use reverse psychology, we should offer crypto-bros to run the entire globalfinancial system via the exchanges and faulty dapps they have built to rug people.

With the condition that if one is hacked or malfunctions the responsible crypto-bro would face life in jail.

Let's see how many accept

We might not even need cryptocurrency if we were capable of keeping the financial sector honest.

Remind me again how many people went to prison after the market crash of 2008?

From the outside, a lot of cryptocurrency seems like an attempt to extend this kind of immunity from consequences to smaller scammers. Where's the improvement here exactly?

A financial system built on top of transparent and trustless components is opt-in. That means that if all my currency is based on trustless structure I can be responsible for my currency and when it's transparent I can be more aware of how the fungible units of my currency are being used in the wider ecosystem.

As it stands, private banks (the fed) have not only the ability to manipulate my currency, they are actively encouraged to do so.

Sure you can build scams and call it cryptocurrency in similar ways you can scam people in fiat. I'm certainly not claiming crypto solves all problems, only that it provides a solid foundation for society to build a better financial structure on top. That improved foundation does not mean society will build stronger on top of it, it just means that it gives us the ability to do so if we choose to do so.

I don't believe it's possible to have equality in our money without rules that apply to everyone. Crypto can apply rules to everyone, equally. Compared to our financial institutions today that are very much tier privilege controlled by the government, which appears to have strong malicious influence from the largest stake-holders in our current financial institutions.

I don't believe it's mere coincidence that wealth distribution is becoming dangerously unequal, I believe that is a direct consequence of our financial system.

This is how banks and the economy should be run. Lose our money, lose your head. Skin in the game solves most problems.

It doesn't really solve anything: either nobody wants to be part of it anymore with no working system as a result, or it will be manipulated like any other system and low-level employees will be the scapegoat.

It would significantly reduce the size and reach of these entities. There would be no global financial system, and that would be a Good Thing (tm).

I doubt that prediction is accurate. No global systems is a bad thing, and no financial systems is a bad thing too.

By global, I mean Universal, all-encompassing. Advocating for one such system is like advocating for a global government.

There are better alternatives. Local, discrete, networked systems that can co-evolve with its participants. They reduce of chance of total collapse of the system and can be isolated when needed, stopping the risk of contagion and avoiding "too big to fail" entities.

Totally. Skin in the Game should be a fundamental filter to determine social policies. How about we also make that those supporting the current global financial system face consequences for their horrible actions?

Like this: if you own stock of any global company, you'd be responsible for all and any financial crime they have committed. If you use credit from any bank operating in more than one country, you are also responsible for any crimes the banks commit. Let's put in jail all the HSBC customers, after all they also contributed to all the money laundering they did all these years.

This is exhibit A in why creating an open source monetary system is so important. Because it robs those with all the power and wealth from manipulating the system for their benefit via monetary and economic policies.

This is also why most of the critiques of capitalism fall flat in my opinion. Capitalism is not the problem, but the financial system is. The financial systems greed and market manipulation is what people are trying to eloquate when they say things like “unfettered capitalism”. You can have capitalism with an ethical monetary system, we just don’t. But we could.

So it's not the system itself, but the greed and manipulation. If any currently existing system could exist but without people's greed and manipulation, would it be as bad as it is now?

I think people who have things (imaginary power in the form of numbers in a spreadsheet) will work very hard to make sure that at the very least they can keep what they have, and generally will just want more of the same.

Then again, the scope, size and blatant abuse varies from country to country and in some cases gets re-dressed and hidden behind movements, religions, armed conflicts etc. and a universal system for everyone is unlikely to work in the real world, at least not with identity politics and borders.

Everyone is against cryptocurrencies, till they get their bank accounts frozen for no particular reason.

Crypto currencies are also make graphic cards for playing computer games more scarse. A reason graphic cards can be used for mining crypto currencies. Secondly crypto currency proof of compute is power hungry and we have global warming. Crypto currency will probably become state issued with a transparent strong id transaction ledger of who did what.

I no understand what you talk about, the cryptocurrency I am use (Neo, Cardano, Stellar, IOTA) have no the crypto mine.

You don't "use" them, you speculate.

Why then is 'Stripe?' 'using' them for payments and not for speculation? [0]

Perhaps they think cryptocurrencies has a use case as well and must have waited some years for them to improve and pick a few for their use case, before entering in the market again?

[0] https://stripe.com/blog/expanding-global-payouts-with-crypto

Like my grandfather used to say, "if you feel froggy, then leap, boy"

Attempting to shut them down will prove (or disprove) their real value.

2019

This is from 3 years ago. How is this getting voted up?

He was working for the World Bank.

I thought cryptocurrencies were proven to be a bubble, according to them. Now they're a threat!?

Bubbles are threats for the economic system? We had a very famous instance of this not even 15 years ago, and another about 23 years ago.

Yet we didn't "shut down" the internet or housing.

You can't.

That's the whole point.

Yet another dinosaur talking about things he does not understand. How does he propose to do that?

> cryptocurrencies should be shut down.

Sorry. You can't just 'shut them down' and the regulators also know it. If that was the case, all these cryptocurrencies would have died much quicker along time ago and we wouldn't be saying 'please shut them down now' today.

> He worries that they enable illicit activity by making money transactions less transparent.

And this 'illicit activity' is traceable for everyone to see on a public ledger so everyone knows where the money is going such that exchanges find that useful enough to prevent them from cashing out or blocking payments associated with a suspicious wallet address?

You can't just shut them down... But you might be able to effectively halt their use by making it much harder to transfers money out if the ecosystem by making possession of them illegal.

I'm strongly anti-crypto but I don't support trying to ban them. I might support a middle ground such as requiring people to be accredited investors to buy them, depending on the details.

Fiat exchange points are completely bannable and would make cryptocurrencies irrelevant.

No, it wouldn't. You'd be making exchanges irrelevant and you will be creating the opportunity for the growth of a parallel economy.

I can even tell you exactly how it could be done. Take Hub20 [0]. Currently, it is meant to work as a "run-your-own crypto bank" and is only focused on ethereum networks, but it would be almost trivial to add support for banking networks like SEPA (EU) or Pix (Brazil). Given that it works with the assumption that users inside the same instance trust each other, I could setup an instance for myself and add accounts for people that I know personally. Someone in my network could have an account on another instance, and that would be enough to establish a mesh network of unlicensed exchanges.

Now that I am thinking about it, you are almost making me wish that we would ban crypto exchanges. ;)

[0]: https://hub20.io/about/

It’s actually super easy to shut them down. USG just waiting to rugpull for max pain.

> It’s actually super easy to shut them down.

Then why after many years is Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, and the rest of 100s of others still alive?

It is because they know they cannot totally 100% ban and shut them all down? We both know they haven't banned these cryptocurrencies because they can't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com