It's interesting because in startups, you learn from the first day that you should listen to customers and follow the demand. The demand is very high and some people were puzzled how other people where depositing money in "shady" exchanges. Yet, that's a perfect example of "demand" that needs instruments to be satisfied.
Reality check: Most of the world suffers from hyper-inflation at worst and inflation at best. Not everyone lives in the USA/Europe and has access to good banking and investment options. Not everyone cares about their governments like in a developed first-world country.
Crypto is here to stay and it is going to play a significant role in global finance. Somebody here should read what the bureaucrats at the IMF thinks, or look at the roads in New Delhi. Gov. blocking crypto, yeah, right.
I strongly suggest you look into why people would want "censorship resistant, decentralized, non-state, peer to peer currencies". The existing financial system doesn't make sense. Stores of value outside the reach of the state is highly desirable. The ability to transmit value, trustlessly, anywhere on the planet via a communication channel is a breakthrough technology.
Who wants inflating, dirty, war promoting, state based fiat, when they can have deflating, clean, peace promoting, non-state based cryptocurrency?
Of course inflation is bad you should see what $100 over 10 years at 2% inflation is.
Now try it for 6%+.
It’s the reverse compounding for savings people should strive for.
Who did you learn your basic economics from?
Market cap absolutely does. It's meaningful that of the 18.8mil btc out there, no one is willing to part with one for less than $56k.
Even the Tether concern is somewhat outdated. It now makes up only 4.5% of btc & eth's combined market cap. The mkt cap of btc and eth fluctuates about that much every few days, is it enough to really matter?
> like 99.9% of transactions are valueless gambling OR money laundering.
You need to prove that. GBTC and CME options volumes/open value are in the billions. I don't think people are laundering money through these instruments.
Real question - you mention earlier to "follow the demand". Is there evidence that demand for crypto is coming from countries with unstable banking?
https://think.ing.com/uploads/reports/IIS_New_Tech_Cryptocur...
The more unstable the country, or higher inflation - the higher penetration.
I'm surprised people still ask these questions. It this not painfully obvious?
Not sure if you meant "look at the roads in New Delhi" in a "derogatory" sense, but I'd just like to say that the roads in New Delhi are some of the best roads here.
I live in Bangalore(Roads here are darn horrible) not Delhi, but instead of looking at this in an "derogatory sense", in all honesty what the person is actually right.
In the overwhelming number of issues facing India- Literacy rates, hunger, infrastructure, social crises, is crypto the biggest issue facing India?
e.g. from this article: "India is also looking to make a framework for the official digital currency that will be issued by the Reserve Bank of India."
Seems to me that CDBCs are just the new topic for conspiracies about how cryptocurrencies are being held back by the Powers That Be.
That holds true of a lot of human innovations. People could not imagine automobiles or flying or computers, but that did not make them impossible.
Once you have some of your money in cryptocurrency there's no real way for anyone to stop you from moving your money around however you like. The only points that can be controlled are interfaces with banks.
This is one of the, if not the most, important levers it has to wield power. Governments have fought wars and enslaved entire continents to protect and increase the value of their means of account. Even recently, think of how hard the US works to maintain the dollar as the only currency that can be used international oil transactions aka the petrodollar.
Ultimately, cryptocurrency is a technological attempt to solve the problem of a fundamental lack of trust in our traditional institutions. After all, its powered by a set of de-centralized, trustless protocols. If you use crypto as an inflation hedge, that means you don't trust your government to not de-value your labor via printing tons of new currency. If you use it to carry out transactions, it means at least a small part of you has doubts that our that our current, centralized payment processing institutions won't unilaterally roll those transactions back or eliminate them outright in the future. Ditto for property rights and NFTs (and all the other use cases that guarantee a transaction is recorded by distributing it on chain).
Allowing crypto-currencies to supersede local currencies would not only put governments at the mercy of the mob (or perhaps a small number of whales and exchanges) for determining the value of their citizen's output, it would be an existential admission of their failure. Other than governments that have already failed at administering a currency like El Salvador, why would any self-respecting government with a functioning currency admit defeat like this?
It is going to be an interesting battle. I got my popcorn and enough fiat currency to survive whichever way this goes. In the worst case my plan is https://xkcd.com/538/
even bitcoin’s taproot amendment that just got passed and implemented does this to a limited extent
You can build untraceable anonymous cryptocurrencies using these algorithms.
The banks, even before the ban (which has yet to come), were keeping track of customers making payments to exchanges. In some cases, they customers a letter, erroneously citing an central bank order banning cryptocurrencies that had later been struck down by the Supreme Court. Despite no regulation, they've been denying services to exchange, preventing their cards or UPI payment addresses being used to transact either. Most mobile wallets followed suit.
The only option that remained then was P2P. I should caveat that I'm not sure I fully understand how that works in this case, though.
The issue is there's no real anonymous way to pay someone besides cash, unless you already had a crypto account with a wallet that had been filled. So an informal economy will need a safe way of turning physical cash into crypto and vice versa, in a regulatory environment where it may be banned to transact cryptocurrencies.
Crypto adoption is a gradual curve where people will only slowly start putting their savings or investment funds into a crypto account.
It's speculation, plain and simple. If not ban, government needs to regulate it like it regulates other speculative markets.
As for the libertarian goals of removing the central authority - that's not happening.
The fact is that blockchain solves a problem for almost nobody. The primary use seems to be to avoid real or threatened government intervention. These uses are largely illegal, by definition (eg bypassing capital controls in China). Now you can argue the morality of such laws but that's irrelevant.
Cyrptos have wildly failed as a "currency". Even so-called "stablecoins" just peg themselves directly or indirectly to fiat currencies so they're really just adding another point-of-failure. We should be calling them "cryptoassets" not "cryptocurrencies".
As for escaping government seizures and the like, try telling that to Ross Ulbricht [1]. This year, China started to crack down on crypto mining [2].
The "security" of crypto is a myth. They can and have forked and have well-known weaknesses (eg 51% attack). I can't help but think of this [3] wrt security.
Proof-of-work wastes a ton of energy for basically nothing and, just like China, countries will increasingly clamp down on this, especially as voters increasingly face rising energy costs.
Proof-of-stake is basically a fantasy of how we'll solve PoW problems with a lot of hand-waving. It having not happened yet is pretty good evidence of this being a fantasy.
All it really takes is for action by the US and/or EU to say something like "financial institutions who trade in cryptos lose access to the banking system" and the market implodes. Sure the government can't stop you adding more transactions to the blockchain but for what? If no one can take your "currency" what value does it have?
Weirdly, crypto has seen the resurgence of gold bugs who have long held an irrational hatred for fiat currencies, completely with false claims in some cases (eg the US dollar was never 100% backed by gold, ever).
Things like reversible transactions and the ability to print money are actually a feature not a negative as they're often portrayed.
And even if you get past all this, you want users to securely manage a wallet when failure to do so means they could be irreversibly be robbed of their balance?
Governments are slow to react and they tend to only react to things that become viewed as a threat. Crypto is so niche it's not a threat. But that doesn't mean the US government couldn't fatally wound the crypto market tomorrow if it chose to.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/24/business/china-cryptocurr....
So if a country makes the possession of cryptocurrencies illegal, it makes their people digitally possessionless.
This would cut them off from the next version of the web. Similar to how North Korea cuts of their people from the current web.
So far it seems no country that cuts of their people from the internet has been able to flourish.
You can buy and own a domain name. If trust in DNS is violated, we'll have much bigger problems.
It's like owning a key to a door. It gives you the power to lock and unlock the door. No social contract needed.
You can not own a domain. You can only pay a registrar to have them talk to a registry. You then are at the mercy of both. Use the HN search tool to read an endless amount of horror stories of people who lost domains and sometimes decades of work because of this.
There's no reason why the ownership in digital space has to be on a decentralized blockchain, you can also record it centrally (as shown by trusted entities like VISA etc).
When you own property in real life the record of
ownership is maintained by the city/state/country.
P.S: I'm someone important at LongShort.Finance
So I opened the site and it pretty much only asks me to connect to the wallet. No explanation of what it does, what it’s for etc. which are even standard in scam websites. They sure appears extremely scammy even though it might not be.
What a peculiar addition to your comment.
Everyone here is important.
Other coins will be considered exclusive pathways for money laundering and will be nerfed like bearer-bonds or precious metals are in the US.
There's no actual resource - violent or material - that backs any crypto. The only backing is it's novelty. Once the novelty is copied by the State, it will be rubbed out IMHO.
> usefulness of cryptocurrency is going to be considerably constrained
Sure, but you are missing why 3rd worlds like China, India and Morocco are trying to restrict crypto. They are worried about capital outflows. It's not a surprise most of these countries already have rigid capital controls. People who have decided they want to "outflow" their capital are not really worried about government restrictions.
That's... A big deal?
That is a pretty big condition. Most of the people who buy crypto wants to buy from some trustworthy site, and if that is stopped there will be effectively zero new crypto being brought inside the country. Also no one knows how much hassle will it be to convert it into money in bank, this is likely to stop almost all trades.
At that point, you cannot move your money around however you like, you can only move the tokens around on the blockchain.
A ban would force the wallet's company to stop allowing its use on crypto exchanges.
- buy international prepaid cards for legal dervices (bitrefill)
- use p2p local crypto exchanges: localcrypto, localmonero (in some countries this can be 100% anonymous by using the "withdraw from atm with 1 time code" bank services)
- Exchange to alternate "tokens" that are legal (anyone remembers Linden dollars to BTC market around 2010?)
- Exchange locally via sneakernet.
Defi, NFT, Crypto all have Ponzi features. The people who win are early investors and the ones who lose are those who are late to the game. So, we invent "new" schemes like NFT, Defi etc.
There is no product. Nobody uses Defi to "borrow". 99.999% of the people want to put their crypto in and magically get some crazy XY.ABC% APR on their crypto. Everything runs on greater fool theory.
When the bear market hits there will be a lot of bag holders wondering why the hell they paid $10k on a monkey pic with sunglasses and a cigar.
During the euphoria phase people act like they are misunderstood geniuses and people who rightly call this a ponzi scam are those who don't get "it"!
I mostly "use" crypto to keep USDC in DeFi sites like Aave for ~3-10% APY and some on Gemini for a FDIC insured 8% APY. This money primarily gets lent out for other people margin trading, but you don't really need to take on any of that risk for yourself.
I just want to respond to this:
>Proof-of-stake is basically a fantasy of how we'll solve PoW problems with a lot of hand-waving. It having not happened yet is pretty good evidence of this being a fantasy.
PoS is bog standard for new chains. Every "up and coming" chain is essentially a clone of Ethereum with some scalability improvements and proof-of-stake for consensus. See: Harmony, Luna, Avalanche, &c
This couldn't be further from reality. Blackcoin (2014), Peercoin, Decred, etc...
Eth 2.0 is running, right now, with billions in value. The whole of Eth is planned to move to 100% PoS quarter 1 of 2022.
I have heard this so so many times. ETH moving to PoS fully in X months. I'll believe it when it happens.
And I'm glad they plan on making it happen cause there way too many things harming the environment already. A major cryptocurrency reducing their environmental impact is welcomed.
I tried to find any company who was using blockchain in any meaningful way. I couldn't find any. All I could find was promotional pieces mentioning what COULD BE DONE with blockchain or a trial that some big name company was CONSIDERING. No updates on the results of those trials or if anyone actually carried out the trial.
Proof-of-worrk blockchain is such a terrible, wasteful and bad concept that anyone who has ever worked with any database would know it's not even close o being useful.
Moreover, I can spend my conventional money in digital space and get further use from. A "digital possess" seems a thing that doesn't improve the world in a good way.
Crypto makes so many things so much more efficient that not having access to it will be like not having access to the internet today.
People imagined versions of those things for a long time before they were practical. People have imagined other types of currency as well, and non-state backed currencies aren't even novel given plenty of examples have and do exist.
I agree. I was just nitpicking; that roads in New Delhi are actually pretty good. You should look at the roads in rest of the Delhi. The district that I live in (North East) has infrastructure in such stark contrast to New Delhi that it doesn't even feel like the same city tbh.
> is crypto the biggest issue facing India?
It absolutely isn't.
But somebody begs to differ: https://www.livemint.com/news/india/pm-modi-has-a-warning-fo...
Most people who buy bitcoin today in the first world do so because it's made money for people.
Sure, in third world countries and elsewhere, people skirt or break the law on a regular basis. But they still don't it for kicks and they don't do it for "right to cryptocurrency", they do it because it will get them something and making crypto illegal will mean it gets people less and people use it less, reducing demand and price (minus the manipulation bitcoin experiences but at some point that manipulation won't be manageable).
Read the rest of the report. The details you want also exist, but you'll have to pay for that education, only so much you get for free.
But I wanted to know about what Polygons ZK plans are and why GP hopes they succeed.
If they are centralized, then a ban from India wipes out polygon is my thought.
https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2020/08/understanding-inflation/
"sorry we are criminals, but it's for the best"?
You could try to pick a source that's at least not entirely biased.
Money like everything is a market. There is a supply of money and a demand for money. If the demand remains constant but the supply is curtailed in some way I could see the value of the good exchanged going up. Now if you make the argument that this action would decrease the demand then yes the value should go down?
The difference between this and something like the 1920s alcohol black market in the US is exactly the point that people are raising when they talk about cryptocurrency lacking fundamental value. Alcohol has fundamental value (it is a drug with some effects that have proven to be valuable to many humans for thousands of years), but a currency does not have any value in isolation. People didn't stop wanting alcohol when it was banned, but they will stop wanting a currency if it is banned. It will not have a similar "constrained supply driving up the prices" effect to black market alcohol, because alcohol's demand never wavered but demand for cryptocurrencies will. It is not irrational to buy black market alcohol that you can drink or sell, but it is irrational to buy black market currency that you can neither drink nor sell.
This is all made generally moot if India is the only place to ban it, because they won't make a huge dent in the global market.
Demand for a cryptocurrency is set by some combination of (a) it's utility as a payment tool and (b) it's value as an investment vehicle.
Legal restrictions reduce it's utility as a payment tool, driving down demand. They also disallow a significant group of investors from using it for investment, both reducing demand, and temporarily increasing supply as many legitimate investors (especially institutions) would have to sell off their holdings before the law coming into force. There's no obvious mechanism how these restrictions would somehow curtail supply more than the demand.
I said illegality constrains the usefulness of cryptocurrency. Long-term gains is one of the remaining hypothetical uses but other uses are limited. So your claim doesn't refute my point. With fewer practical uses, we might see bitcoin's long terms value decline but that's speculation.
That said, you're right that ability to actually spend bitcoin probably shows up in any PDE that accurately models its market dynamics. If 90% of countries on earth ban bitcoin, and those bans are well-enforced, bitcoin probably won't be very valuable.
It's one practical use case. Bitcoin's value rests on multiple use cases and eliminating other uses cases reduces demand for bitcoin. And that effect also reduces bitcoin use for wealth storage (but might not eliminate, sure).
Like what? I can currently pay for any legal physical or virtual good I can think of using a conventional credit card. Crypto might or might help privacy and might allow you to buy illegal things more easily. It's a hedge against inflation but a number of things have that quality.
The use of crypto seem inherently confined to keeping the state from doing things to people's money. States can be terrible but since crypto doesn't stop state from doing things to people's physical person, it's most often a protection of the rich from the state, which isn't something I'm particularly in favor of either.
I've been hearing the same story on crypto since 2011/2012 and it's become no more useful to the average person. The only thing that's changed is more people who know nothing about technology are raving about how its going to change the world so I should buy Bitcoin.
I can currently pay for any legal physical or virtual
good I can think of using a conventional credit card.
You still need to prove that though.
within the country, you'd be committing a crime acquiring stuff using crypto. The cards are international but you're committing the act locally.
>use p2p local crypto exchanges: localcrypto, localmonero (in some countries this can be 100% anonymous by using the "withdraw from atm with 1 time code" bank services)
Will all be banned and illegal services. If it touches a bank you'll likely get extra charges on top for money laundering or similar.
>Exchange to alternate "tokens" that are legal
That will be tracked by the government if legal, or illegal if not tracked.
>Exchange locally via sneakernet
"exchange on black market"
None of these things are solutions.
The holders obviously.
Bitcoin allows any Indian with a cellphone to easily exploit global arbitrage opportunities (BTC/INR and */INR to /) , bypass capital controls, and save money in a medium that the Indian government cannot debase. At least a few million people (especially the international traveler class) will find these characteristics extremely valuable whatever the status of local regulation.
What happens if the devs go crazy and decide to eg. Ban transactions smaller than $1M worth of coins in code.
Someone made the point the other day that miners might not fancy this PoS change because they’re heavily invested in equipment.
So miners have to make a cost-benefit analysis as to how much control they can exercise while not causing a hard fork as well as what the consequences of causing a hard fork would be. Likely right now they're using accrued coins to prime their stake in PoS rather than directly working against it - delay helps them here.
There are many checks and balances to all successful open-source projects.
And when that fails you can always fork it.
The more than 1000 validator nodes require a proof of stake.
If everyone stashed money in mattresses (as if), then all the banks would be forced to start enticing would be depositors with “store your money with us we will pay N% interest!”. This would bring out the savings from mattresses to be used.
Social Security is just one form of retiree income, to which I’ll tell you because they are the ones that pay and the gov dictates the “official” CPI, they are heavily incentivized to downplay inflation.
For an example of this, see how many times they have changed the CPI formula. Just recently the FED put out a tweet essentially saying:
“ Thanksgiving dinner serving of poultry costs $1.42. A soybean-based dinner serving with the same amount of calories costs 66 cents and provides almost twice as much protein”
This tells you how they think and how they fudge with the numbers.
Last but most importantly, not any single group of humans or much less gov bureaucrats can set and perfectly dictate a market. Its too complicated. Every time they or someone meddles, they make it worse.
No, banks would not be forced to do that. First, banks don't need deposits and some big banks - investment banks - refuse to even accept deposits. Banks make money by borrowing from money markets at one rate and then lending at a higher rate. Their value is credit analysis and credit intermediation.
E.g. if you are a household, then you would like to borrow for a mortgage. Well, the Smith Family does not have access to the bond markets. But Big Bank does. Big Bank makes loans to thousands of families like the Smith family, it does all the credit analysis checking their work history, etc, and then it either sells bonds to raise the money for the mortgages, keeping the mortgage on its own books, or it packages up the mortgages and sells them off as mortgage backed securities.
It is the fact that you can't borrow from the money markets but banks can that explain the existence and profitability of banks, as they sit between you and the capital markets. If you kept your money under a mattress, the banks would still sit between you and the capital markets. If everyone emptied their bank accounts overnight, the bank would need to sell some assets for reserves, and then buy paper money with the reserves, and then give you the paper money. The Central Bank would then purchase assets creating enough replacement reserves and the system would continue as before, just with a lot of money stuffed in mattresses. In fact this isn't even theoretical, as there is a lot of drug money in the form of cash hiding in Latin America. It's not in mattresses but it has left the U.S. economy and no one cares as we just print more.
Whether or not banks want to get into the deposit game is a function of whether they think the deposit fees and customer relationships created will be of sufficient value to offset the costs of providing those services. For many banks, getting depositors establishes a relationship in which you will turn to that bank when you need a loan, etc.
Moreover the interest charged to banks is not subject to manipulation by households that refuse to deposit their money in banks, first because banks don't lend deposits, but second because the bank's cost of funding is determined by the Central Bank's overnight interest rate plus a premium for the credit-worthiness of the bank itself. Whether the bank does or does not provide deposit services is irrelevant. Deposit services are purely sales channels and fee generation channels.
Suppose a hypothetical scenario, where a malicious actor sneaks in a bug into the node's code, that causes the requests signed by your key to be rejected, and the code gets deployed to the majority of the network. Your key/token becomes effectively worthless.
Suppose a (much less hypothetical) scenario, where a state decides to outlaw the technology, which puts node operators/users at a legal risk, disincentivizing the use of the network locally, and diminishing its value globally. You still "own" the token, but it's that much less useful.
There are different considerations, trade-offs, threat models, failure modes, horror stories, but nothing about ownership in a decentralised network is _fundamentally_ different - it's still built on trust.
Everything else is tulipmania.
The value of digital property is widely accepted for decades now.
What crypto adds is that you can hold the key to your property yourself. So others can not move or delete it against your will.
>The value of digital property is widely accepted for decades now.
You're conflating all digital 'property' with blockchain bullshit, and also pretending my bank account is a digital property.
>What crypto adds is that you can hold the key to your property yourself. So others can not move or delete it against your will.
Society need not support your want for crypto, especially where it harms society and reduces its ability to control financial regulation.
They cut off Wikileaks, the pirate bay, various kink/porn sites, and any entity they don't like really. Usually all it takes is a warning from them to completely shutdown an entity, or worse, force them to obey. Coinbase voluntarily doesn't deal in Monero for this reason for example.
There was a call to treat NFTs as securities. If something like that is done, then any illicit trade of securities would be considered illegal, if not money laundering.
Ignoring the 6,000,000x return over the last 12 years to make a point about it being flat in the short term? Not a great counter attempt.
There are plenty of things in ubiquitous use that are illegal in some places, or even most places. Alcohol is ubiquitous, guns are everywhere, gambling, cocaine and marijuana come to mind, people modify their cars beyond legality quite often. Lots of people do illegal financial activity as well, most people transact under the table when the opportunity arises. You can have a scenario where cryptocurrencies are widely used even in places that ban them but are so ubiquitous that enforcement is untenable.
But why would you want to sell a house this way instead for a permitted means of payment? Even if your scheme is unlikely to be detected, if does add a nontrivial risk of getting detected (or getting intentionally exposed, or blackmailed to get exposed) and get very unpleasant consequences for that, and given the extra difficulties of enforcing the deal, you would likely expect a significant extra markup above "normal price" to sell the house this way. Furthermore, if this is criminalized, then even offering or requesting this as an option carries some risk.
Also, I'm not informed of Indian law, but in most western countries this "donation of house" would definitely incur a significant tax and possibly trigger a tax audit/money laundering investigation. Combined with the risk markup, that would meant that laundering cryptocurrencies would be somewhat expensive. Not impossible, of course, money gets laundered - but it would mean that you would actually have to follow all the inconveniences, risks and costs of a money laundering process if you'd want to handle cryptocurrency, and that would discourage many people from doing so.
1) I'm not familiar with tax laws in India (or Brazil) but in many places this would trigger gift taxes, imposing a large financial overhead to this transaction.
2) The regulatory bodies monitoring for illegal transactions will see right through this one.
How would that work? Can't you just not donate the house, after they have given you their crypto?
Perhaps the profit from holding cryptocurrencies could be considered laundered once converted back to INR since the profit itself was illegally earned.
The next thing you read about will be the $100T in the bond market trying to find exits to something that has any kind of return to outpace inflation.
Maybe that will be Bitcoin, an asset that has grown >100% per year for the last 10 years.
India banning cryptocoins doesn't mean that people will automatically be jailed for mining on day one. It just means that anyone using cryptocoin to avoid paying Indian taxes can end up jailed when their expenditure exceeds their provable income, or when their documented income is traceable to cryptocoin, or etc.
The United States IRS doesn't have to make cryptocoins illegal to convert into currency; they just have to demand that you pay taxes, and have you jailed for tax evasion if you fail to do so. They don't actually care if you earn income through selling cryptocoins for currency, as long as you report the income earned without attempting to evade an honest assessment of value, and as long as you pay your taxes on that income earned.
Their focus on requiring "origin of and taxation of" attestation may impact the perceived value of cryptocoins when traded for currency, but they don't seem to much care if people want to generate hashes and sell them to each other, just as long as it's not used to launder money or avoid taxes.
It is of significant debate whether the perceived value of cryptocoins is in part due to its value for both laundering money and avoiding taxes, but that's distinct from whether the perceived value is in part due to the ability to sell cryptocoins for currency.
My warning is that the open-source Pandora's box of zk proofs is necessary, technically feasible, and inevitable. ZK proofs are coming, and there will be systems built on top of them. Our governments and societies need to be ready for this reality.
Do people really think that today? I did, when i was a teenager discovering the Internet, and then quickly realised how naive that is when my favourite torrent site got taken down, and when a public digital library website got taken down like a terrorist organisation with a SWAT team taking their servers.
It's just like governments trying to ban torrenting and p2p file sharing. Look at how well THAT went.
I can think of a few reasons. The buyer offers you a large premium, you know people who can help you offload the currency, you have no interest in keeping your capital in a controlled environment, maybe you're selling your house because you're leaving a country and taking bitcoin or whatever is the easiest way to take your capital with you.
Won’t this become politicized eventually and we’ll end up with a Central Bank-like structure? Imagine some elected dev going on CNBC to tell us they need to mint more coins.
And, obviously, this is political. Miners make a lot of money off the status quo, devs want to reduce the energy/environmental impact of their chain. Proof of stake takes away a moat that miners have built around their operation (now anyone with 32eth can be a validator). There's no way out of that conflict of interests without some degree of politics.
"Citizen, too much meat eating this week. Your CBDC non-cash is now suspended until you lose 10 pounds"
https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2020/02/contingency-planning-cen...
https://www.bankofcanada.ca/research/digital-currencies-and-...
Cryptocurrency fanatics think that they can digitally outcompete physical reality. They cannot. The governments of the world are the Borg - you will be assimilated.
I am a person with nuanced thoughts and opinions, unique and diverse from the rest of the world.
>cryptocurrency
Let's not confuse zk proofs with cryptocurrency. Powerful, non-cryptocurrency systems that use zk proofs are coming. Alone their power is something we must reconcile, even before combined with distributed, autonomous systems.
And that's my point. ZK proofs are astoundingly powerful. Our societies and governments should be getting ready to deal with them.
>protect itself through regulation
Yes, this is a tool of the state. But it's just that, a tool. People have tools too.
The assertion of absolute state control is contrary to the state loosing the Crypto Wars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars). The Crypto Wars were one of the first examples establishing the limits of state power in the face of the Internet. This is before other global projects like BitTorrent or Gnutella.
The world is wide and I suspect the future is going to be weird.
It only has to go as far as the person you are sending it to, and it's journey is finished, and it's value is realised. Crypto is entirely different in that it has no value unless you can sell it on to another person. That final step is it's weak point.
Now, why the state would do that, or why anyone would inherently mistrust the state, are open to discussion.
That's my point. You can ignore economics entirely and zk proofs are still going to radically transform our societies and IT systems, long before considering their impact to the cryptocurrency industry.