8246
8247

Priority makes sense, more likely to stop bitcoin than caste killings and rape.

8248

Governments are only capable of doing one thing at a time?

8249

Point was that stopping cryptocurrencies is literally impossible, so they shouldn’t even try. It’s utterly wasted effort, unlike addressing that other stuff.

8250

Now that attitude is going to be the one that helps stop climate change.

8251

There are vastly more effective ways to address climate change than ineffectually trying to stop people running a program on their computers. Things that might actually have a chance of working, or at least making a dent.

8252

They can’t stop individuals, but they can certainly find and shut down large scale farming operations.

8253

How can you tell what they’re running on their computers? It’s not like a farm where dogs can smell weed. Track down supply chains for GPUs? They could be doing deep learning, pattern matching, AI stuff. Then you have to get a warrant to take a look. And for what purpose? The whole thing is silly.

8254

If only there were a way to encourage them to be carbon neutral. It could drive investment in green tech. We should start a new cryptocurrency designed for that

8255

Stadia never had a chance with these attitudes towards data centers that only some people find useful.

8256
8257

If more countries ban it that would crash the value, which would work remarkably well.

8258

You cannot stop people from making cryptocurrency, no doubt. You can certainly make sure you do nothing that indirectly encourages such actions, though. Refuse to accept them as legal tender, disparage them any time you can, and eventually you might erode some support I suppose.

8259

Just making it a pain to turn cryptocurrency into real actual currency you can exchange for goods and services would go a long way towards making it less interesting.

8260

If the problem you’re trying to solve is carbon emission, taxing or limiting carbon emissions will do it.

8261

I’ll be the first to explain to anyone why cryptocurrencies are stupid and have no valid use case (I’ve had this discussion several times outside of here already) but to say that they should be banned is naive and dumb.

You can’t just blanket ban the whole concept of cryptocurrencies. I bet no one here can accurately define what a cryptocurrency is, in a way that can be targetted via a law. You have a distributed database system that uses specific consensus algorithms to agree or disagree on transactions. Good job you’ve now described 99% of the distributed systems run by every type of company (including banks). Are you going to ban using public/private key encryption?

Are you going to ban the act of exchanging any virtual asset for money? Ok well there goes the steam marketplace and thousands of legitimate online shops.

So what are you going to ban individual cryptocurrencies (despite the fact that new ones are popping up every day)? Ok so you ban Bitcoin from the US and realize you’ve done nothing about carbon emissions because Bitcoin is mostly mined out of farms in China (Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index - Digiconomist).

Are you going to ban Ethereum (which is less than a third of the energy usage of Bitcoin)? Good job you just banned the biggest cryptocurrency going off of proof of work (meaning it’s energy consumption is going to plummet soon).

I’m the farthest from anti-regulation you can get, but the idea that you can ban crypto is dumb. The only way to effectively ban it is to increase the cost of electricity so it’s unprofitable, but that has way more cons for society than pros.

8262

Regulators in most major jurisdictions have already defined crypto-assets and some have even developed taxonomies to differentiate between different types of tokens. It’s certainly not an easy task to do it well, but it’s not impossible if you want to. Actually getting the result you want from a ban, that is indeed trickier. China already has pretty strict controls on crypto, and yet.

8263

Maybe but if you look up at least the IRS definition of a virtual currency it’s still extremely broad in it’s definition to make a narrow law around them difficult.

8264

I think that should virtual currencies become big enough to present a danger to a national economy (or more likely, threaten the scope of a government’s overall economic control), then the legislators may not worry too much about painting with too broad a brush and treating e.g. accidentally shutting down the Steam marketplace of penny-jpegs as acceptable collateral.

In any event, surely these kind of things are always refined over time through case law precedent and high court rulings, and you would defer to a government agency to make reasonable interpretations of the law in the face of changing facts on the ground.

Consider the jurisdictions which have laws involving pornography - similarly difficult to pin down in a narrow, technical way, but… you know it when you see it.

8265

Sure, but the IRS isn’t a financial regulator. It’s a tax authority. It wants its definitions to be broad so as not to leave loopholes. Compare with, eg the SEC framework, which is designed to precisely (as possible) identify when a given token falls within securities regulation (Bitcoin and Ethereum do not):

https://www.sec.gov/corpfin/framework-investment-contract-analysis-digital-assets