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by IfOnlyYouKnew 1772 days ago
It’s baffling how people here continue to insist that anybody disagreeing with them must be stupid.

More specifically:

> this will effectively censor and control the code that an American software dev would have to write to comply with proper reporting

The idea that software today isn’t already, and has been from the times when bugs were actual insects, been the subject of (or had to account for) regulation is simply absurd.

As just the most obvious example, the financial sector is heavily regulated, and that includes the software, from KYC rules similar to those now proposed for cryptocurrencies, to endless requirements for documentation and archival or the exact prescription of the algorithm to be used to settle transactions.

The software in your car, plane, phone, or nuclear plant is required to follow a few dozen regulations, ISO standards, and best practice standards elevated to requirements. Every website accepting payments must implement some minimum of consumer and data protection. Your emails should respect the Oxford Dictionary and The New York Times Manual of Style, and the ADA may or may not include some requirements, although I’m not sure how binding they are.

What’s happening here is the collision of reality with two fundamental misunderstandings in the crypto community: first, they considered themselves valiant warriors challenging the FED/$/governments, certain to be immediately targeted by “the establishment” trying to defend its mighty power. Then, they expected to win that fight with superior technology. Or, as seems to be happening here, the idea that “it’s online” and thereby outside the jurisdiction of the law.

What happened was that for a decade or so, “the establishment” reacted with some mixture of mild interest, bemused looks, and just not giving a shit. Then, when cryptocurrencies had proven worthless except for scams, tax evasion, and CO_2 production, they started cutting it down to size, with maybe a few weeks’ effort at the SEC and probably half a dozen backbenchers’ amendments to the “Stuff We Should Do IDK Could Start To Get Annoying Act of 2022”.

I guess what will be most annoying, besides being the last fool sitting on a million $’ worth of random strings, is how maddeningly unspectacular the end will be.

2 comments

Do you sincerely think these 70 year old politicians understand the technology and implications? There can be varying amounts of regulation and oversight for software, but the whole point of a decentralized crypto currency is it's ungovernable.

If you're for this increased regulation fine, just understand it will push innovation and capital elsewhere in the world. And despite what you may want, bitcoin will not die.

> but the whole point of a decentralized crypto currency is it's ungovernable.

Why should governments care about opinions from the crypto industry, if the whole point is to evade legislation?

>Do you sincerely think these 70 year old politicians understand the technology and implications?

Politicians of any age aren't domain experts and don't appear to be any smarter than they have to be to get and hold office. Judging from reading the writings from politicians of yore, I do have to say that the better minds in Congress can't compare to their 19th C. equivalents. It could simply be that a classical education served as a sort of filter.

As far as implications, humans are notably bad at that generally, whether it's tax law or something that involves those computer things. The laws of unintended consequences continue on, but that never stopped the writing (by Congressional staff) of more and more rules for us all.

>If you're for this increased regulation fine, just understand it will push innovation and capital elsewhere in the world.

What does this even mean? What innovation did Bitcoin bring to the world other than an easy way to bypass government control? That cat and mouse game has existed as long as governments existed. This only helps if you are fleeing from a worse government to a better government. Completely avoiding governments is impossible. Even on El Salvador Bitcoin acceptance depends on the government.

Pushing capital doesn't even make any sense. What are you going to do with all your "Bitcoin" capital if nobody is trading their USD for BTC? Is the economy of El Salvador really powerful enough to counteract the loss of USA as your trading partner? USD and BTC are just numbers on a balance sheet. You still need to convince people in the real world to give up their real wealth in exchange for it. For the USD it's pretty obvious. People pay their taxes and debts in USD. If the number of people doing that is shrinking then the amount of real wealth you can extract will shrink. That also applies to BTC. It's not like moving BTC from USA to El Salvador will also move factories (you know, the capital in capitalism) there.

Bitcoin brought a trustless way of moving capital or digital property to any location throughout the world with no intermediary.

Today it might just be El Salvador but bet on more countries joining the network based off of the game theory of the network. This innovation is profound and will revolutionize economies in the 21st century leading to better allocation of capital and the world finally getting off of the petrodollar.

Do you sincerely believe these 70 year old politicians write these amendments themselves, without any input from an army of underpaid graduates of Harvard Law and Caltech, or the ability to call Elon Musk whenever they are having trouble setting up their granddaughter’s bottle rocket?
Except they're not calling Elon Musk either, because Wall Street is sitting right next to them telling them what to type in order to protect their vested interests.
Not true. With the notable exception of malware and an ambiguous thin line on cracking software, these regulations only apply to operational facilitation, usually requiring financial participation in the activity. Of course when the activity is associated with terrorism, treason, or ‘crimes against humanity’, almost anything goes. Admittedly this could be a very wide net, as we saw with crypto regulation in the 90s, although I don’t know that any open source contributors were prosecuted.

But, reality check, it will not be a matter of laws once the threat becomes existential.