Unfortunately, pointing out the fact that this sort of faux scaling will lead to centralization is never going to be popular among the tech illiterates at this site who believe Roger Ver over listening to people who actually work on the bitcoin code.
It's kind of weird really. They think they can make reality go away because they make sockpuppets and try and force an outcome that will make them rich. By being really loud, and not really understanding how any of the technology works. All they do is copy paste things from people they think are smarter than them. Sadly, they are being played by much more experienced shysters and charlatans. Reckon it's mostly kids though.
One of the great things about bitcoin is it gives libertarianism a business model... and it's right out of SEK3's New Libertarian Manifesto--which was written in the 1970s-- SEK game theorized out what would happen with the Soviet Union, and proved to be correct 20 years later... now we are seeing the exact same game plan here in the USA with bitcoin and this law. But they are too late. Most likely outcome is this will get reversed or widely ignored.... but if they are successful, everyone smart will start leaving the country... or they will create an arab spring like response here, eroding respect for the government and police.
Gay rights couldn't be resisted in the age of the internet when everyone knew their cousin or that guy they went to work with was gay.... will be the same thing with bitcoin.
Question is, just how violent and authoritarian the tyrants in DC want to get.
People are already leaving the country, and at an increasing rate. The rate of renouncements of US citizenship has been rising for the past 20 years but sharply under Obama. They have started making it HARDER to renounce, as some sort of attempt to keep people in-- one of the pieces of advice you will see often regarding renunciation is to never tell them you are renouncing for tax reasons.
That's one of the reasons they will refuse (yes, you have to beg permission to be let out of your slavery, er, citizenship)..... so the old saw of "you owe taxes because you choose to be here" is false..
More and more americans are leaving without renouncing, just going off the grid in asia or wherever, showing up only to renew their passports.
Once some country is smart enough to offer citizenship to educated americans, the trend will become a tide.
There are countries giving citizenships already for the educated bunch. But most of this is catch22 - you have to have the smart people to attract even smarter people.
I suspect money laundering is already there.... they don't care, its all selective prosecution anyway. The purpose of the laws is not to stop crimes, but to make so many things a crime that if you resist tyranny they can discredit you and jail you.
Any game that has goods that can be exchanged by players is a potential for illegal money transfers even without the ability to get money back out of the game. For example, there's a shadow market for both CounterStrike weapon skins and Team Fortress 2 items. Here's how it works: I have a big supply of items. They have an assigned value. You give me money and the name of the receiving party. I send some items to a broker across the planet. They receive the goods, take their big, and give the rest in cash to the receiving party. We have now just made a wire transfer inside of TF2.
And currently, bitcoin is too hard to use for terrorists or most criminals. You have to be relatively sophisticated. Yah, you may have gotten your grandma a wallet, but that's not the same as mastering the level of opsec to fund a clandestine organization using cryptocurrencies...
And further, since every transaction is recorded forever in the blockchain if any future address is compromised, the entire network can be compromised instantaneously....
Bitcoin is really worse for terrorist financing than good old USD.
And we "lost" trillions of USD on Pallets in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
To the downvoters: Seriously it is. For example: Can you imagine what would happen if we allowed people to have bars? People are expected to DRIVE to a BAR and DRINK! Can you imagine what people would do then, if we legalized the existence of bars? People would drive home drunk!
I appreciate the spirit (I am no DF fan either!) but in the state of New Jersey if you serve alcohol at a party, you are responsible if you allow an inebriated guest to drive off and they mow down people.
If this is about gun control, there is no reason to panic. Your guns are safe.
LOL! I wasn't talking about guns, and no, guns are not safe, every year more and more guns are banned in this country. T he idea that guns are not being banned is just a lie that is told to pretend like not banning all of them outright isn't banning them.
But my point was that just because you have responsibility for inebriated people doesn't mean that drunk driving can't happen-- we should ban bars.
OF course the thing is, most people who go to bars don't drive drunk. They have the freedom of choice.
That's what's scary to HN people... who have been brought up to worship government and believe tyranny is a good thing.
Drivers should be licensed because they're operating a vehicle on shared public property. That's not the same as creating a gatekeeper that imposes a blanket ban on entire categories of private voluntary exchange (e.g. selling alcohol) that are only lifted on a case-by-case basis if one is approved by that gatekeeper.
>>Requiring a higher standard for risky stuff is how we handle everything.
Not really. There are no laws restricting high-risk sexual practices. In the civil sphere, we correctly recognize that individual liberty trumps the personal risk and even public risk posed by risky actions.
It's only in the economic sphere where we restrict private exchanges, and that's because rejecting economic liberty is a necessary precursor to taxing the public and creating regulatory moats to protect industry incumbents from competition.
I'm not being sarcastic in the least. I'm being downvoted because this is a site where critical thinking is not tolerated and it's overrun with millennials who have never had to use their brains.
There are lots of reasons to be concerned about Tethers, formost of which is that they are centralized.
But with the massive on boarding of new customers (coinbase releases customer stats regularly and are having record new accounts created) ... you would expect that the number of tethers in circulation would go up as some people decide to adopt the tether for whatever purpose and more need to be created.
Not quite sure whether they are all backed or not. (and I don't know how to tell at this point.)
This is a great policy, all exchanges should adopt it. If you can only buy bitcoin and only miners can sell it, everyone will make a lot of money!
I’m kidding, of course.
BTW- it takes about ten days for a new account to buy bitcoin in Coinbase— we are having a post thanksgiving rally... it may continue for another 5 days.
This repo is the financial institutions and "CEOs" pushing for an arbitrary change over the objections of the engineers, and in many cases their very own CTOs, and the travesty of how terribly poorly it was written and non-tested shows that bitcoin should never again entertain this kind of nonsense.
This was never about scalability-- the actual on chain capacity more than quadrupled in August and Lightning ads a nearly infinite increase in theoretical capacity.
This was always about the self important CEOs wanting to take over the project and force the engineers into their will.
