re: Dogecoin up 400% in a week

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what stops someone from exchanging a good with me for the tokens?

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Nothing, as long as you're willing to operate on the black market. Of course that will still happen. But we're talking use as an actual useful day to day currency here, which the government most certainly can stop.

I’m looking forward to you Dread Pirate wannabes bitching on Reddit when governments make it almost impossible to spend as a competing currency. The fricking CEO of Kraken has expressed these very concerns and Janet Yellen herself has said numerous times she intends to regulate the hell out of crypto.

But yeah, you, some douchebag sitting on $500 in crypto, probably has a better understanding.

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You can buy Dogecoin on Voyager. If you sign up, use the promo code JOH648 for a free $25 in Bitcoin.

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The one using the code has to trade a minimum of $100 and then both receive the $25. One doesn't get it just for signing up.

Do you think they are just going to crash the portfolios of all these institutional funds that are gobbling bitcoin up in their funds? Do you think they are going purposely destroy publicly traded exchange companies? Do you think they will wreck the balance sheets of those companies that have purchased bitcoin? It is a $1 trillion+ asset. It isn't going anywhere now. The government missed their chance of destroying it

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I bought ~600 for $1.90 a couple months ago for shits and gigs. A couple nights ago I put in another $10 for another 100.

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The only cryoto I have is what i got on coinbase earn. Since november its grown from $9 to 222. I keep moving it around to various coins based on results of the day.

These guys are still living in the 2010's after the bitcoin documentaries they watched

This is sort of relevant; a thread I saved a while back. Twitter - Allen Farrington. Not so much about government control, but more about the big banks getting involved and creating a watered down cryptocurrency.

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Thanks so much to @EpsilonTheory for indulging such degenerate plebs as @AleksSvetski and me.

I want to do a thread while it's still reasonably fresh on trying to steelman Ben's "Wall Street swallows Bitcoin" thesis, as I have a newfound appreciation for it after our chat.

Okay, so first of all here's a strawman, which I will admit is more or less what I thought going into the chat:

"Investment banks comes to control so much of the circulating supply they can do all kind of annoying forky statist shite and it will become unusable for the good guys". That's NOT what he means!

What he means I think is much subtler and more sophisticated. I'll say upfront I don't agree with it (assuming I've even captured it properly) but I do think it is amongst the best articulated threats worth being aware of.

What I think he means is that precisely the attraction of Number Go Up will mean Wall Street's propensity to financialize and skim flows will lead to them not crushing it at all, but something far more like: offering a fake version that attracts far more capital. Now you might reply: "that's dumb, my bitcoin is real bitcoin, I don't need JPMorganCoin."

And again, Ben would agree (I think) but he'd add that if you end up in the distinct minority, that doesn't matter at all.

He isn't concerned about Wall Street coopting *the protocol* - he knows that's stupid. he's concerned about it co-opting the *narrative*, such that so many noobs from this point go through a hyper-KYC/AML'd Bitcoin Lite that a blacklist would make perverse financial sense. In his dystopian vision, EVERYBODY USES BITCOIN!

Except it's bitcoin-lite. the regular user doesn't even realise the difference, and "real" bitcoiners screaming on the sidelines are socially ostracised.

I think this really is a very sophisticated concern. It's clearly an attack vector, but of a variety I don't think I've heard of: it's a social attack. it's really a form of psyop, and where bitcoiners and Ben can firmly agree: if there are two institutions running a psyop that you don't want to cross it's Wall Street and the USG.

I thought of an analogy a little too late in the conversation to naturally bring up, but I wonder what @EpsilonTheory makes of it:

He's worried Bitcoin gets facebooked. So, from the perspective of the creative and developmental explosion of the web leading consumer internet services away from the early walled gardens of AOL and CompuServe, eventually nearly everybody ended up back on AOL 2.0: facebook.

I'm obviously skipping an enormous amount of history here but I also kinda assume this audience knows it all: as this transition happened, a small number of passionate enthusiasts for privacy, sovereignty, decentralisation (sound familiar?) got agitated, but couldn't stop it.

Not because facebook "sent jackbooted thugs" (as I've noticed Ben likes to say) but because it was just easier, slicker, more natural, etc.

Regular people simply didn't care that it was in direct violation of the ethos of the web, because it worked so darned well.

And the people who wanted wider adoption of more deemed-to-be-moral tools were just pushed aside. They were still free to use these tools themselves, and even free to convince others to use them.

It would just never work.

And that's what Ben is worried about here. Interestingly, he identified NgU as potentially a curse in this regard, because (benefits aside) people attracted for that reason alone *will not care* whether they are using real Bitcoin or facebooked Bitcoin.

@mentions made a great point in response: that's why education matters. it's why toxicity matters. it's why NgU must be understood as primarily a technical benefit, not an advertisement to get rich quick, and that if number does go up, stay humble.

Given we all seemed to agree on this, that seems like a good point to end this thread.

Please correct any of this I have misremembered or misunderstood, @AleksSvetski and @EpsilonTheory.

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hm interesting thread, thats one of the more thoughtful criticisms

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Probably why we’re way more rational about the possibility of government over regulating the market than you dorks that think it’s untouchable because reasons.

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Reasons:

The government cannot confiscate it from a cold wallet

The network is far too large and powerful to succumb to a 51% attack even from a nation state

The government has no way to restrict P2P transactions

Decentralized exchanges like Uniswap exist if they try to regulate our ability to access the exchanges or the exchanges can simply move abroad and we will at worst have to use a VPN to access them, should we want to convert fiat to crypto.

Public companies in the US have put portions of their treasury reserves into BTC so it’s self defeating to regulate it away

We just had the largest exchange go public

Some congressmen and the current chair of the SEC are well educated in crypto and sympathetic to it

If we were harsh on crypto as other nations adopt it, we will become a follower instead of a leader in this space and risk severe economic harm should something like the IMF removing the USD as a reserve currency ever occur.

I think it’s more likely the government eventually seeks to establish their own treasury reserve of BTC than they are to take aggressive action against it