What do you think about a global electronic currency?

[Lindsay]

 

[Heart of Space]

I recommend a book on this subject.  

It basically highlights some of the economic turmoil caused by competing currencies on the global market.  The basic idea is that each country has incentive to manipulate the value of their currency relative to others in order to gain economic advantage in trade.  The problem is that the inevitable conclusion to these currency wars is that they are ultimately destructive to all parties.  

Now of course the USA wants a global currency, but they also want to be in control of that currency much like the FED currently controls the creation of US dollars.  

Obviously, there are a few major super powers that will not bend the knee to this since accepting a global currency as the currency for your country means that the US would have 100% economic power over you.  But it's interesting non-the-less that they are slowly pushing in that direction.  It will be interesting to see where this goes.  

[Leo Gura]

Won't happen for a long time because every government needs the ability to print money to finance themselves.

To have a world currency will require having a world government, which won't happen in our lifetimes.

BitCoin is the closest thing. But it is already very heavily regulated by all governments precisely because they cannot print more of it.

[FlowerNote]

It will not happen for a long time, because the  benefit of having separate currencies is that you can have different monetary policies for each currency. Until we truly become a global village this benefit is needed. 
 

@Leo Gura Bitcoin actually can’t be regulated by definition, its a decentralized currency. Yes governments try their best to regulate the exchanges where bitcoin is traded for cash, but the currency itself is anonymous & decentralized by principal.  

[Leo Gura]

10 minutes ago, FlowerNote said:

 

@Leo Gura Bitcoin actually can’t be regulated by definition, its a decentralized currency. Yes governments try their best to regulate the exchanges where bitcoin is traded for cash, but the currency itself is anonymous & decentralized by principal.  

This is an anarchist joke.

BitCoin is not anonymous at all. All BitCoin transactions are easily tracked by the Feds.

And it can certainly be regulated. BitCoin is worthless without exchanges. And all exchanges are already totally regulated by the Feds.

The people behind the recent BitCoin Twitter scam have already been caught simply by tracing their BitCoin exchange IDs.

The Feds will never allow something like BitCoin to exist without near-total regulation. Because an unregulated currency is one of the greatest evils that can exist. Anarchists and libertarians fool themselves into thinking that an unregulated currency will be great, but they have no idea of how freedom works, so they don't understand that actually it will be evil.

However bad you might think the US dollar is, an unregulated currency is 100x worse.

[FlowerNote]

@Leo Gura You are actually wrong. Yes your BTC adresses, where money is moved to and from, are not anonymous. However there exists a thing called bitcoin mixers which almost all heavy users of bitcoin use, criminals and money launderers.

They work like this, if you send me (The mixer) 10$ in bitcoin, they can see the adress where it came from and the adress where it is sent to. However i send you 10$ In bitcoin back, from a completely different adress, to another completely different adress in your control. It is now your job to slowly cash these bitcoin out without suspicion. How else do you think cyber-extorters get away? Yes you are right in the fact that bitcoin is traceable (untraceable if you use mixers) but it certainly is anonymous. You can generate bitcoin adreses without any identification.

As for your example, they must have done it in a really dumb way. Why else do you think bitcoin is still the preference for any cyber criminal? If you know what you’re doing you cant get caught. Of course you wont hear the media repeating this.

It cannot be regulated because all bitcoin transactions happen on the blockchain which is completely decentralized by definition! It is the very reason bitcoin grew any value in the first place.

There even exists a cryptocurrency now which is 100% untraceable; Monero. 

Its not an anarchist dream, its reality. The technology has allowed for it, simple.

However I do agree that there can never be only deregulated currency. The deregulated currency is only worth shit if you can trade it for regulated currency.

 

 

[Heart of Space]

5 minutes ago, FlowerNote said:

Its not an anarchist dream, its reality. The technology has allowed for it, simple.

It is an anarchist dream in the sense that they believe it's actually a superior form of currency in terms of the functionality and success of your economy.  I would debate God himself if he disagreed with me on that point and it would be an easy debate to win.  Decentralized deflationary currency would absolutely never work as well as a centralized one.  Period.  

[Leo Gura]

BitCoin mixers are mostly illegal from what I understand. The Feds shut down mixers all the time.

Of course you will always have black markets. But it will never be allowed to go mainstream because it's so dangerous.

You have to distinguish between fringe stuff and mainstream stuff. Fringe stuff has always existed and will always exist. You can always trade blood diamonds, but it will never rival the dollar.

[FlowerNote]

@Heart of Space Yes very much true. Its more of a criminals dream than an anarchist dream. 

[Heart of Space]

2 minutes ago, FlowerNote said:

@Heart of Space Yes very much true. Its more of a criminals dream than an anarchist dream. 

Anarcho-capitalists and small government types slob all over the knob of bitcoin because it's a newer superior form of the gold standard.  

[FlowerNote]

@Leo Gura With the rise of the darknet a global black market has sprouted. The feds would love to shut the darknet down which is impossible. Ironically the darknet (tor browser & hidden services) has been designed by the USA. Frankenstein vibes.

I think it is understated in the media how big of problem this will be. Interpol has already warned that they are failing miserably at controlling the darknet market.

[FlowerNote]

@Heart of Space I bet. But who cares about libertarian fairytales. Globalism is coming and is here to stay. I was actually quite shocked at watching Leo's video on libertarianism, one of the least profound videos of him. That got me thinking, this is probably only profound in the USA. Here in europe you are either far right or globalist. Its probably because we had feudalism in Europe, and the USA was founded with the libertarian dream in mind in the first place. Here in Europe we know authority is needed.

[Leo Gura]

21 minutes ago, FlowerNote said:

The feds would love to shut the darknet down which is impossible.

Feds have successfully shut down every single popular darknet marketplace. So your characterization of the situation is just wrong.

Like I said, there will always be blackmarkets, hackers, and criminal enterprises, but they will always be shut down given enough time and they will never become mainstream.

Just because piratery exists does not mean that piratery will be a viable mainstream thing. Most people don't want pirates. And for good reason. Pirates tend to be devils.

When some asshole hacker steals all your BitCoin, you will think twice about how good it is that BitCoin is unregulated.

The whole point of regulation is that when some asshole steals my credit card number and makes unauthorized charges, my bank immediately pays me back the money -- leaving me a happy camper.

One time I had some scammer charge $5000 on my bank account. Another time he went on a shopping spree in Hollywood, buying all sorts of expensive luxury stuff.

[Parththakkar12]

@Leo Gura It's decentralized, but it's not unregulated. It's very heavily regulated. The regulations are publicly voted on, i.e. they're not enacted by a central authority.

[FlowerNote]

@Leo Gura Its true, they have shut a lot of markets down. But the actual frame where these markets stand, which is the darknet, can never be shut down. I advice you to read up on blockchain technology to see how dire the situation really can become. With blockchain technology nobody is in control. 

Of course it will never become mainstream. But it is growing out of proportions. There are big markets online right now which have been online for 1+ years. They will be shut down eventually but that does not mean they haven't operated successfully for over a year, moving huge volume. You underestimate the power of technology in these situations.

For example encrochat, an end to end encrypted chat service, has recently been shut down and hacked by the police, they were able to read all messages. However this was only possible because the police seized the servers and put a new update out for encrochat, which was actually a virus created by the police, uncovering all encrypted keys allowing for the messages to be seized and read. So the problem lay in the centralized nature of the service. 

With true end to end encryption the messages will take literally millions of years to crack. Technology can do somethings no humans can do.

I say all these things with confidence because I have a friend who studies cybersecurity at university who catches me up with all these things. The regulation is less strong than you think.

[FlowerNote]

@Parththakkar12 Tell me how exactly is bitcoin regulated? only someone with a huge amount of bitcoin can do this.

[Parththakkar12]

@FlowerNote There is the reward and punishment system, which will penalize you for tampering with the blockchain. Other servers will catch on to this as the blockchain is publicly available.

Because the consensus algorithm is public, you need more than 50% votes to make a change in it. That's where regulation on the validity of transactions can really happen.

Edited August 3, 2020 by Parththakkar12

[FlowerNote]

@Parththakkar12 Lol, there is no "reward or punishment" system. There is no tampering with the blockchain, that is exactly how the blockchain works. You can't tamper with it because there are tens of thousands of computers mining the blockchain at the same time.

The blockchain only consists of transactions being broadcasted, blockchain mining and rewards for mining. nothing else.

Edited August 3, 2020 by FlowerNote

[Parththakkar12]

@FlowerNote There is. Mining is rewarded, hacking attempts are punished.

[FlowerNote]

@Parththakkar12 I did not know hacking attempts were punished, gotta look into that. However this type of regulation is still on the blockchain and thus anonymous and untraceable if done correctly.