[JumpCrisscross]

> why is that?

The web3/crypto community seems to select for individuals with an almost proud ignorance of the law and state power. The same personality that can make a 21st-century gold bug pitch (e.g. a world on crypto is one without wars, Bitcoin is impossible to ban, or Luna is magically stable et cetera) is one that reacts to an arrest warrant by no showing and tweeting.

[lexapro]

You know, it's kinda funny that you mention gold bugs. Because gold shares a lot of properties with Bitcoin, and therefore should be considered a sham by most of HN. Yet somehow it sits currently at $1,670/oz and is owned by all major central banks in the world.

[JumpCrisscross]

> gold shares a lot of properties with Bitcoin, and therefore should be considered a sham by most of HN

Gold and gold buggery are separate. Gold and silver have deep precedence as money. They're also useful commodities. Gold buggery involves retail investors disproportionately allocating to gold as a buy-and-hold asset, often with emotional attachment. Those buying crypto because it's going to free the world or whatever resemble the latter.

[lexapro]

Central banks definitely don't own gold because it's such a useful commodity. Are central banks gold bugs?

[JumpCrisscross]

> Central banks definitely don't own gold because it's such a useful commodity. Are central banks gold bugs?

Are central banks retail investors? Are they buying gold to "to free the world or whatever"? No [1]?

Gold and silver have deep precedence as money. This leads to them trading as haven assets, i.e. their price rises when financial conditions deteriorate. Bitcoin doesn't. It trades as a risk asset, i.e. its price falls when financial conditions deteriorate. This could change! But that's true of literally every thing traded.

[1] https://www.bis.org/publ/work906.pdf

[ipaddr]

"Gold and silver have deep precedence as money"

Bitcoin has that rep as well.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Bitcoin has that rep as well

No, it doesn’t. The evidence is crypto trading as a risk asset. People believe it could one day trade as a haven asset, but that hasn’t happened yet. Not close.

[tim333]

>Central banks definitely don't own gold because it's such a useful commodity

It's proving quite useful to Russia's central bank which is selling gold to China as many of its other reserves have been frozen.

[aaaaaaaaata]

> gold buggery

This could be an interesting thread in itself.

[Scoundreller]

We could argue (and agree) that Canada isn’t major, but their central bank sold off their bullion gold reserves ~ 2 decades ago. And finished off its hodl of gold coins ~7 years ago.

https://www.kitco.com/news/2022-05-26/Gold-is-an-antique-ins...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/gold-canada-reserves-1.3443...

[lazide]

Canada exports large amounts of gold - it’s one of their export commodities. 14B/yr typically.

You don’t need to stick it in a bank when you’re digging it up in a those volumes every year.

[ipaddr]

Canada did it to increase diversity of investment "investing in financial assets that are easily tradable and that have deep markets of buyers and sellers"

The truth is probably based on the money they received from selling the gold as a retail coin

[rurp]

Among other reasons, it's non-trivial to walk off with $10M worth of solid gold owned by someone on another continent.

[lexapro]

It's also non-trivial to guess a private key or to run a 51% attack.

[rurp]

Judging from empirical results it is quite easy to steal crypto currency; it happens all the time. I don't know why you only care about those two approaches.

[lexapro]

Because leaving Bitcoin on a hot wallet, which is the source of most of these hacks, is like leaving gold bars on a park bench.

[mcguire]

https://images.app.goo.gl/kYh4i5pcJupVpacR8

Gold scams have been around for a significant number of decades. Bitcoin has been hyped to death for its entire existence, in spite of the "properties" it shares with gold.

Note: I own neither.

[tmpz22]

Thousands of years of cultural significance enables gold to be assigned more value then it otherwise would have.

[timmytokyo]

Exactly. There are plenty of other precious metals that could have been used for the same purposes as gold (e.g., platinum, palladium, iridium). But they aren't. For various historical reasons.

[sulcate]

But elements are not interchangable and have important differences in properties, difficulties in refining, and workability.

Gold is tremendously useful for many applications and I believe all that you mentioned are brittle in comparison. I believe it's also rarer than a few on that list.

Mainly, I've heard a few people in my life contend that we only arbitrarily decided that gold has a use, or that it's mostly hype. I don't think that's the full case. It's workable, useful, biocompatible, profitability extractable, and obviously stunningly pretty. Not so much just culturally significant just on a whim or something, it's useful.

[lexapro]

But this could also happen to Bitcoin and crypto bros would certainly argue it has already started to happen.

[rowanG077]

It doesn't share the most important property: intrinisic worth.

[Garvi]

So it's a counter-culture thing like hippies and punks of the past? I thought those all died with moderated social media. Is it at all about "sticking it to the man" or is it purely profit motivated (by the followers of those individuals)? It's most likely a mix of the two, but to what degree.

[naet]

A lot of the crypto culture is IMO not counter-culture, but almost "hyper-culture". Crypto lives on hype. Most rhetoric used by the likes of Do Kwon is focused around building hype for their particular brand of crypto, hoping to entice other people to invest in it.

They may use some terminology that sounds similar to counter culture at face value (eg "stick it to the big banks!") but they aren't doing this in the counter culture mode of rejection, they are simply using it as a sales pitch towards moving more crypto.

[notch656a]

>The web3/crypto community seems to select for individuals with an almost proud ignorance of the law and state power.

And the problem with that is what? State power and law failed us.

[JumpCrisscross]

> the problem with that is what?

Generally: if you’re trying to fix something, understanding how it works is usually a good start.

Specifically: pompous ignorance leads to gross negligence and criminality so stupidly brazen a B-list editor would send it back for being unbelievable. The sort that is rampant in crypto/web3.

[notch656a]

>Generally: if you’re trying to fix something,

Yes the fix is clear to me. Remove KYC+AML from the banking/monetary system. The expansion of crypto is in part a response to a pompous ignorance of government officials, attempting to impose a search of your papers merely for banking and the government implementing policies so stupid even a B-list editor wouldn't believe it.

The government failed so other actors came in, then everyone made a sad face that when the government failed alternatives were found.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Remove KYC+AML from the banking/monetary system

Luna's downfall and Do Kwon's pending red notice have nothing to do with KYC or AML.

[notch656a]

>Luna's downfall and Do Kwon's pending red notice have nothing to do with KYC or AML.

I disagree here. The 'killer app' feature of crypto is that it's basically imperfect banking without KYC/AML. Without crypto's popularity it's doubtful Do Kwon and Luna would have gotten such a foothold.

[JumpCrisscross]

> [crypto is] basically imperfect banking without KYC/AML

Pretty solid case for why these folks should go to jail. Or at the very least, be disgorged of their gains and banned from finance.

[freen]

Chesterton’s fence fail.

[notch656a]

>Chesterton’s fence fail.

Excellent point.

The legislature ripped quite a bit of privacy and freedom from the banking system post 9/11 on an almost blind rampage, without doing much stopping and asking why things were they were. I admit it was the ultimate Chesterton's fence fail on the government's part and likely a big reason why a new fence seems to have been built with crypto.

Honestly even bitcoin the white paper seems to have had more thought poured into it than the Patriot Act, which kicked off much of the KYC reforms in the US. In reality I think many of the adopters of cryptocurrency realized exactly the dystopia that the banking system was going down and very deliberately tried to take some of the failures of government into account.

[MomoXenosaga]

People just don't want to pay their taxes,buy drugs/weapons/illegal porn or launder cash. Couching it in high minded ideals isn't fooling anyone.

[freen]

The libertarian fallacy: the solution to bad regulation is no regulation whatsoever.

[rurp]

This reminds me of an old skit, I think from Monty Python. Where a bunch of people in ancient rome are pissed off. "What has Rome ever done for us?!".

"Expect for roads"

"And sewers"

"And protection from invaders"

"And enforced contracts"

And so on...