Governments can either get onboard, and come up with a reasonable, practical regulatory environment, or alternatively they will be left behind and Crypto will evolve to circumvent their wishes.
It is a shame but the USA may end up leapfrogging the EU in the same way they have done with other innovations, like Social Media, Self Driving Cars, and other cutting edge tech. It turns out regulating entire sectors of the economy out of existence has consequences.
Cutting edge? The only special thing about Bitcoin is the blockchain which only matters when there is a shortage of trust. Bitcoin may force government to be more responsible because it can be used to circumvent capital controls or price controls. Any advantage other than trust that a public blockchain has can be replicated through a private blockchain. It's just software after all.
Considering the monetary philosophy behind Bitcoin it is basically motivated by gold which is something we abandoned as a currency because we know it doesn't work and doesn't make sense. It's akin to having shares in the global economy. If you own 1% of the economy in 1930 then you will also own 1% of the economy in 2021. You're just a deadweight leeching off the economy. Since your share is fixed but the economy growing you are getting richer at the expense of other people. More and more people start investing "into money" and then quit working. You get a bust or recession or depression when people consider money a superior investment over actual work. Thus the economies' size is limited by the quantity of shares. If you issue new shares people will immediately start working for them even if it is at the cost of diluting them. You can clearly see it happening with the block reward. Bitcoin miners work like crazy, consuming an absurd amount of energy. The same applies to gold.
The inflationary coin was tried more than once. I remember one that wasn't content with infinitely expanding the monetary base - it would delete balances at random, watching people try to defend the idea was hilarious.
What if Bitcoin continues as it is, which is a way to preserve a part of wealth in a semi-liquid way. Once it hits an equilibrium point, it doesn't go any higher due to the limit in it's liquidity.
And then what? Crypto will magically take over all government functions? Or will people be happy in a governmentless-society? Where hospitals and roads don't get built but at least there's "freedom"?
Maybe we should develop less taxes, try to charge everyone with fixed amount for gov services or move some expensive services to private ownership?
Private hospitals based on private insurances will surely build themselves, I promise you that, that's a too highly profitable sector of economy not to invest if there is no competition from the government.
There are like zero real reasons why person with 100k EUR income should pay more than 10k EUR income person living in the same city and consuming the same amount of public services. Current system is completely unjust and based on money redistribution (that's called robbery if that's is done by a mob without the gov id card).
Free capital controls provided by crypto (i.e. ability to flawlessly move billions through the border without anyone's allowance) introduces unprecedented competition between govs for educated and rich citizens, which may lead to lower taxes, less regulations, more freedoms and less bureaucracy. That a good goal and incentive, don't you think?
Sure, but even looking at the most corrupt, they have little incentive to enable fraud, crime, and tax evasion by people they're not already in mutually beneficial arrangements with, and none to enable it for people who won't give them a cut.
Yup. A technology which is mainly used for money laundering, dark-net markets, ransoms, and speculation will certainly attract the attention of government.
Savings/store of value is a bigger use case than anything you mentioned. Not sure why critics have to be so disingenuous if they have a strong enough bear case.
Are you assuming that somebody thought that? Or did somebody share that opinion with you? I don't mean some anonymous person you argued with, I'm talking about a real person. Because I was involved back in the single digit days - and I never encountered that kind of sentiment. Things have actually played out as expected: governments stalling for time in a weird prisoner's dilemma by sowing as much uncertainty possible without hamstringing their economies for the next century.
The beginning, like when people were commonly introduced to the concept through the whitepaper and a link to the reference client source? And those people thought "public ledger" meant "governments can’t track how I spend my money"? A short time after the USG shuttered a non-fractional, gold reserve backed, paypal-like financial network? Okey dokey.
Well, a little bit later. Usually those were the people getting on bandwagon based on the wrong premise. "Independent from a centrally controlled bank system", "the government cannot track me", "the government cannot take my crypto away" (so they technically cannot but they can definitely block moving it so that it essentially becomes worthless), you name it.
In the hindsight, the central control over crypto may give it a credibility boost. It doesn't really solve the problems of how easy is it to get scammed / lose it but it may swing the usage majority towards legit markets.
I have no idea, really. My initial statement in this thread was an emotion driven one.
That is one of the more honest admissions I seen. Like I said, I've been around long enough to have seen it occur in real time - and I regularly argued with people in the early years... I almost miss the beany baby comparisons. The majority of the time the beef seemed to be ego shielding, followed by a slightly smaller group that was just frustrated about reality not aligning to their world model. But the journalists that had declared bitcoin to be dead at some point in the past - those were the most unhinged... I'm talking life ruination levels of assmad.
Clueless people didn't start showing up in appreciable numbers until much later, well after the events of the MtGox implosion. Even then they stuck mostly to the scamcoins, because "who can afford spending $125 for one coin?!"
I don't know what you're referring to with regard to centralized control lending credibility, but I will say that fungibility is a property of currency that people generally don't seem to understand - and that you may want to consider proposed "anti-fraud" methods in that light. That was what we were talking about years ago - a currency, that was the premise. It still is, there is just a more representative cross section of the general population showing up now - unsurprisingly half of them posses a below average level of intelligence.
All other governments will follow soon.