Cryptocurrency allows people to exchange money without dealing with financial institutions or governments. I don't own any as an investment, I use it for playing poker online. That's it.
We give too much voice to all these people suffering from hysteria. I suspect the only reason these people are given a voice is because they usually call for more laws to "fix" more things which benefits those in power.
edit: Also speaking of things we should ban, I think if we are talking about things that are actually harmful to society (not that I actually give a damn), we should start with banning twitter so that we can stop hearing these "moral" rants
That's not really accurate. For most people, they deal with financial institutions directly via the fiat onroads and offroads fror the exchanges.
The fact that you can formally buy, exchange, and cash out of crypto with full banking support gives cryptocoins a veneer of Government support and legitimacy.
The USA bans online gambling and ponzi schemes. Cyrptocoins are worse, because they include a side order of immense waste of electricity and advanced manufactured computer chips, and enable ransomware.
I think this article is completely correct. We, as members of the tech community, have a duty to communicate with the public and democratic representatives that cryptocurrencies are a harmful technology, and the formal exchange of them for fiat should be banned.
Can you (and your representative) please just leave me alone so I can harm myself with this "harmful technology"? Whatever the outcome, I'll take my chances. Please leave me alone.
Yeah, all the problems of the world are due to bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. Embarrassingly, more than a decade in, HN is still struggling with it. I don't consider harmful, I consider it a godsend. Ten years ago, I knew HN was wrong, it will still be wrong in a decade.
> The environmental harms of cryptocurrencies hurt everyone. It's a classic externality.
A rational solution would be a carbon tax, so pollution is no longer an externality. Focusing only on Bitcoin only makes sense if one's agenda is just to hurt Bitcoin.
I want to see those things go away too, but we're going to need to significantly increase the energy efficiency of our entire society to be able to achieve that. Cryptocurrency mining is anti-efficient, by design. How much coal generation could we retire just by eliminating the energy demand from cryptocurrency mining? I suspect the answer to that question is more than zero.
Does that make it right? Ignoring that, many private institutions go out of their way to ban transactions in things that the government doesn't even ban. Marijuana in states where it is legalized for example. All forms of sex work on the misguided belief that it somehow benefits the sex worker. Etc.
Also I don't have a duty to follow your misguided morals.
We give too much voice to all these people suffering from hysteria. I suspect the only reason these people are given a voice is because they usually call for more laws to "fix" more things which benefits those in power.
edit: Also speaking of things we should ban, I think if we are talking about things that are actually harmful to society (not that I actually give a damn), we should start with banning twitter so that we can stop hearing these "moral" rants