Comment by hombre_fatal 13 hours ago
I think it makes sense to start from the idea that you should be able to transfer funds to someone, like $100 to your mother, without needing the government or a megacorp to facilitate it. The same way I can gift my TV to my mom.
Whether that's cash or cryptocurrency doesn't seem to matter since your argument would also apply to cash.
Start from the assumption of liberty and the freedom of association. Unfortunately, most people don't believe in human liberty and prefer varying degrees of slavery.
> If you start from an assumption that there should be no regulation, then your conclusion will be that there should be no regulation
To be fair, they argued against intermediation. Not regulation. Requiring a filing for every $100 cash transfer to one's mother would satisfy their requirement.
How about this:
Regulation is a controlling mechanism that puts constraints on what people can and can't do. Some constraints will enable more things to happen because it reduces certain risks (e.g. property rights and laws against stealing enable investment and development of property).
But when there is too much regulation it has the opposite effect, and instead of enabling progress it stifles it. It acts as a calcification that slows change and makes society less adaptable.
So it's not that regulation is bad, it's that too much regulation can be bad.
Now in terms of regulating people's abilities to transact specifically: in a health democracy putting some regulations on transactions will probably have a positive effect because it can limit abuse and risk, and therefore increase freedom for honest people to make transactions. However when a civilization reaches the point in its life cycle when it is transitioning from a healthy plurality into authoritarianism, the risk of over-regulation of transactions skyrockets and the elimination of privacy when transacting is extremely likely to lead to tyranny.
When someone acts like regulating transactions is inherently bad, they're either repeating something they heard and didn't question, or they're assuming the people they are speaking to are educated in history and have a healthy fear of tyranny.
If you start with the assumption there should be regulation, even then IDK how you get there.
You're regulating an "untraceable" utterance of a string of data.
Pragmatically it's worse than trying to stop fentanyl, which is already impossible, and even trying to stop it has just made the gangs that much more powerful because they now control whole small nation-state tier light-infantry militias funded by black-market profits induced from trying to ban it.
I honestly don't see any way to effectively ban cryptocurrency that has net positive utility. "Yay we caught some criminals, all it cost us was a dystopia!"
I don't see how I made any less fortified, less relevant of a claim than you did.
You added that most people would be better off with intermediated financial transactions which is probably true for most day to day transactions, but the TFA proposal brings up the question of whether everyone should be forced to use an intermediary.
For example, just using single-use addresses would be considered suspicious, probably just because it complicates basic taint analysis. Yet that's a fundamental component of privacy, and to do otherwise is akin to how Venmo lets people see your own transaction history (a very odd feature btw).
>Nobody here is actually even arguing about the proposal here, just repeating platitudes and analogies.
Well, given that they're responding to this:
>I think it's actually pretty clear that almost all people are not capable of secure and reliable self-custody and would be better off with an intermediary. We're not keeping our fiat currency in a safe under our bed after all.
Why would you not expect people to argue in the style you presented them?
> that's cash
Our world worked with cash before. Sure, it wasn't perfect, but are those imperfections worse than the mass invasion of our privacy? There's no perfect system, so the only question is how we weight certain issues, not that flaws exist. If we purity test then the only winners are the immoral people who are willing to lie and deceive so that their choice appears to pass said purity tests. They love us to spend our time infighting because that's less time working against them.
Cash and crypto do share similar properties that way... but with cash, you can't deposit say, $1,000,000 in cash into a bank, where you can use it for a lot more types of transactions, without forms being filed with the government, in order to both instill fear into the hearts of drug dealers and gangsters (etc) and to help catch them if they're dumb enough.
Now, drug dealers sometimes do just do as many transactions as possible with cash, outside the banking system, for that reason. But they're hindered by these anti-laundering regulations, which is considered a good thing by most.
To me then it sounds reasonable to impose similar limits and reporting obligations - treating crypto as much like cash as is practical - when it comes to exchanging crypto for dollars in any way. It doesn't prevent Bad People from conducting transactions in BTC directly, but they have always been able to do so with cash for some things.
The far left doesn't believe in the idea of property ownership in the traditional sense. So no, I think the premise that you can transfer property to anyone without the government tracking it is incorrect. Taxes could theoretically be imposed, registration might be required to comply with a social "program" they are implementing, etc.
If you start from an assumption that there should be no regulation, then your conclusion will be that there should be no regulation.
That's not actually an argument for anyone who doesn't share your assumptions though and is largely just lazy thinking.
Cash also has physical limitations that make large cross-border transactions hard, which crypto does not.