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Comment by monero-xmr | Hacker News Reader

This would outlaw the cryptocurrency industry in the USA. Anyone running a miner or proof-of-stake validator would be a money services business, meaning they would have to collect personal identity information on anyone submitting transactions to the network. This is technically impossible.

This bill will not pass, but if in some universe it did, the blockchain industry would move entirely offshore. It will not kill the industry, but certainly set it back and make the US a non-entity. This is a very reactionary, "don't let a crisis go to waste" situation following the FTX debacle.

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Why should crypto be exempt from the regulations applied to other financial institutions?

Why should hot dog vendors be exempt from regulations applied to financial institutions? Answer: because they're not financial institutions. Neither are bitcoin miners or proof-of-stake validators.

Centralized exchanges like FTX, on the other hand, absolutely should be subject to those regulations. But in the US they pretty much already are. FTX was in the Bahamas.

because cash is a dying animal and without it we have zero privacy.

In that case, shouldn't we get rid of money laundering regulations for all financial institutions? That would (presumably) provide even more privacy; there's no reason to make crypto an exception.

I accept your terms.

yep, this should happen

It's also scary in that you can extend the premise of knowing the identity of all financial transactions, to anything that obfuscates identity. It wouldn't surprise me if Warren and the other anti-freedom nutters would argue for banning public key encryption, or enforce all key pair generations to be registered with some central database.

Fortunately, public key crypto already had its big fight with the government, and now it's established that cryptographic source code is protected speech under the First Amendment. (Bernstein vs US)

Since it's trivial to write the code to generate your own key pair - there might be a law, but like a lot of laws - it wouldn't actually have much impact and it would potentially have a ton of very negative side effects.

Yeah I agree. She was still my pick for dem candidate for president (full disclosure). I think they are trying to ban anything they can't trace. E. Warren in particular likes regulating banks and wall street.

I agree, fast forward a decade or two from now, and anything you can't trace/undo is illegal.

Not sure having a centralized monopoly on financial power is a net good thing for society.

Then again, if the crypto space has taught us anything, it's that Wall St. isn't nearly as bad as we thought it was. Turns out there are bigger villains in the world than Goldman Sachs.

Part of the social contract is that we allow the government to have a monopoly on the use of force. Maybe that should extend to a monopoly on commerce. Which one is the lesser of two evils here?

A centralized monopoly on financial power hasn't been around since Nixon's days, if not prior. Once we left the gold standard and the Eurodollar market came about with unregulated cashless reserveless systems operating outside of the US responsible for more creation of credit (aka "money") than happens inside the US, the Federal Reserve has been demoted to puppetmaster in chief for a puppet show that keeps the plebs from panicking at the though that nobody is actually remotely in control of the monetary system, and that instability has been and will be doing nothing but grow as time goes on.

The fun part is, they keep taking tips on how to manage a crisis from a country that has been in a state of financial crisis for the better part of 30 years -- Japan. You'd think after decades of dozens of rounds of QE and actually seeing their currency DEFLATE they'd take a hint that maybe it's time to rethink how we actually think about and approach the monetary system, but I'm sure not holding my breath at this point.

Bear in mind that Sam Bankman-Fried was a Wall Street guy before he started his exchange. Could be why so many other Wall Street guys trusted him with their money.

There's no such thing as a social contract, such an idea is preposterous, and to advocate for it is creepy.

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