[reader_mode]

I feel like investing in market pathologies has become too common and modern democratic governments are far too slow at doing there roles and curbing such behaviour.

Bitcoin is the obvious example of something that should have been banned years ago (and all proof of work crypto), but there are so many examples coming up daily, if there was ever any faith in institutions it's eroding quickly, and once you remove that you accelerate the pathologies (people start acting like anything goes) and society starts to destabilise.

[chii]

> Bitcoin is the obvious example of something that should have been banned years ago (and all proof of work crypto)

not that i would invest in bitcoins (or any crypto), but i don't see it as an obvious ban. The only reason i can deduce from your "obviousness" comment is that proof of works "wastes" energy. But then it is hypocritical to argue this when other modern conveniences also "waste" energy, and yet you don't call for a ban.

[ralfn]

It wastes entrepreneurial energy too, since it doesn't actually provide value to anyone.

Not the way a car, a phone, a hairdresser, a movie or Google maps does. The economy is just what everyone does/make. Think of the opportunity cost of all that human resource being wasted on a pyramid/ponzi scheme, which does not produce any value. It only redistributes it, poorly. Yeah thanks. We really need more gambling infrastructure with even less oversight.

If we would make a list of important things we want to explore further, how would crypto be on it? Why?

It's ok as a storage of wealth, but the amount of investment money and energy wasted on this stuff. And in the end it's going to bankrupt gullible idiots that put their pension in dogecoin. Maybe in the US you just let these morons starve, but in the most of the world, you wouldn't. So it makes sense to protect society against having to bail out suckers from a completely useless and pointless economic exploitation.

So I can imagine banning on on the sheer notion the existence is a net loss for society.

[RestlessMind]

There was no value to WWW and HTTP in 1990's. Yet hackers tinkered with those technologies just for the sake of doing something cool and here we are 3 decades later. I see the same spirit with DeFi, NFT, dApps and Crypto in general. And just like there was a crazy boom in the late 90's (pets.com anyone?), history is rhyming again (dogecoin anyone?).

What is sad is that some of the top comments on hacker news are dismissing this cool new tech by choosing to focus only on the negatives.

[dantheman]

Getting out of fiat currency, is clearly a value

[happosai]

If the problem is co2 emissions, banning is not really the solution. The solution is co2 cap-and-trade, with a yearly dropping cap. We have it in EU, and it's very effective at dropping the co2 emissions of electricity production and industry. What is needed is carbon tariffs, or carbon club:

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.15000001

To beat the rest of the countries into submission. If all co2 emissions are under same cap-and-trade emissions system, from climate pov it doesn't matter that bitcoin is energy inefficient. The bitcoin miners will simply have to buy their emissions rights or use clean energy. Even if bitcoin energy use would skyrocket, the co2 emissions would continue to drop at the same rate as the co2 cap drops...

The root of the problem goes deeper - why haven't developed nations such as USA and Australia have co2 cap and trade? I'd blame fox news and its ilk, which have figured out which buttons to press on people to make them dumb. Despite the immense damage to environment and society they have created, democratic societies have not figured out how to fix that problem. Come on, we have had decades of time to monitor and learn of Murdoch et atll, and the problem has only got worse...

[reader_mode]

What is the utility provided by crypto ? Money laundering, avoiding capital controls, financial speculation ? All while burning insane amount of energy and hoging up limited chip making supplies.

It's clear cut that o the whole crypto is a huge negative for society.

[tarboreus]

The use case of crypto is to purchase things online without the knowledge or permission of your government. How you feel about that probably tells you more about how your feel about your government than anything else.

[koonsolo]

Are computer games also a huge negative for society?

With your reasoning, they provide no utility, waste an insane amount of energy, mostly involve violence, etc.

I don't want to live in a country that starts banning things for those reasons.

The utility of cryptocurrencies is not decided by governments, or companies, or you. The utility will be decided by reality. I like living in democracy and capitalism, but it seems you prefer a dictatorships.

[reader_mode]

>The utility of cryptocurrencies is not decided by governments, or companies, or you. The utility will be decided by reality.

No the utility is determined by you me and everyone else collectively. The problem is financial mechanisms that allow inflating these bubbles are not market driven, central banks are flooding the markets with low interest rates, if they want to direct the markets they need to react to negative distortions they cause.

[koonsolo]

> central banks are flooding the markets with low interest rates

Seems like a good reason to store your value in something else than central bank tokens.

You call it "inflating bubbles", I call it competition for something central banks have a monopoly on.

[weare138]

Crypto is no different but instead of central banks you have a shadowy network of large investors at the top artificially moving the market. It's like a continuous pump and dump scheme.

[tablespoon]

> not that i would invest in bitcoins (or any crypto), but i don't see it as an obvious ban. The only reason i can deduce from your "obviousness" comment is that proof of works "wastes" energy. But then it is hypocritical to argue this when other modern conveniences also "waste" energy, and yet you don't call for a ban.

While other activities may be wasteful, proof-of-work is waste distilled almost to its purest essence. It's literally a race to see who can waste the most. There's really no comparison.

[tedk-42]

It's the scale of the wastefulness of bitcoin that matters.

If a car burnt through a months worth of electricity for your home just so you could drive to the shops to get groceries and come back, then that would quickly be banned. Bitcoin and other currencies have a lot of money being pumped into the system by people who refuse to account for the wastefulness that is crypto and instead, want to drive up their investment.

There's no replacement of traditional digital payments by cryptocurrencies.

Going back to the article, I'm glad China priorities it's people (funny to say that given the Xinjiang situation) over the profits of big corporations.

[sgt101]

Bitcoin uses energy without providing substantial utility unavailable from other vastly less wasteful alternatives. Additionally it provides a place for the rich and ruthless to prey on the weak and gullible with endless washtrades and exchange scams. It should be banned.

[askmike]

The utility is hard to measure, but brushing it off being valueless is subjective. It should be clear to you at this stage that not everyone agrees with you.

[sgt101]

The mafia agrees, but the mafia are wrong.

[roenxi]

The governments of the world are one of the driving forces behind the pathologies. The reason asset prices are crazy is because the government has figured out that if they print money and give it to asset holders then they get stock market growth but are still able to call inflation low.

If they didn't have their thumb on the scale, interest rates would be higher and boring, stodgy savers would be in control of the money instead of the sort of people who think Bitcoin looks like a good idea.

If they don't want people putting money into insanely risky ventures they should stop punishing people who invest in low risk ventures.

[reader_mode]

I don't disagree, but I can see why they want high growth. But if you choose that path you need to actively manage the pathological cases, especially the ones you create.

[roenxi]

Picking on a few governments:

* If the US Congress were capable of identifying pathological cases, would the government go through the ceremony of shutting down every couple of years just to remind everyone they can't balance budget?

* If the Chinese government could identify pathological cases, would we have error bars of +- 15 million deaths around their 60s-era economic policies when they tried to rush improvements through central planning?

Those are my top two favourites, but there are others. The approach the government has to climate change also springs to mind. You're calling for something that we have fairly solid evidence that they can't reliably and safely do. They can kill off things that are novel, sure. They aren't reliable at making sweeping judgements about what technological changes are good or bad. Government's are very marginally competent at identifying value for money.

It is far safer to let something like Bitcoin run than risk, eg, a government nipping the next internet in the bud because people are using it to look at dirty photos. The only thing to complain about here is that they've disabled the extremely reliable capitalist incentive structure that would stop people doing things they know to be a waste of time and money.

[native_samples]

The problem is, stock market and asset price bubbles aren't the right kind of growth.

[bitxbitxbitcoin]

How exactly would Bitcoin be banned? Do you think governments would rather ban Bitcoin or Tor first? Or how about blanket “banning” ransomware? Or the other unpopular foss flavor of the month?

[simonebrunozzi]

Start by banning gold, then, which pollutes far more than Bitcoin. I'll wait.

[reader_mode]

Gold has actual utility