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I know I'm eight years late to Andreesson's coments, but I am completely baffled by his claim that a car and garage could automatically negotiate payment using bitcoin but not credit cards. Why? Amazon got its infamous "One Click" patent in 1999. Surely it was obvious in 2014--fifteen years later!--that this claim makes no sense on its face?

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Great article, but I disagree that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are "securities" under existing law. If anything, they are closer to futures, but still not a perfect fit. I think this ambiguity is what slowed the SEC and CFTC from regulating cryptocurrencies proper (ICOs are a different story, and have been properly deemed "securities" under existing law). Its really up to Congress to pass a law regulating crypto, and in turn empowering the CFTC and/or SEC to regulate them.

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my half-baked belief is that the US government should work to absolutely crush crypto as much as possible:

1. negative wealth effects for those who lost their crypto investments would reduce inflation

2. fewer people would go into crypto and instead go into more socially valuable endeavors

3. it would be harder to do crime

4. crypto people losing everything would be really funny

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Whenever I'm buying something online, if I see that they accept bitcoin, I'm suddenly very wary: What kind of scams are they pulling here? I can't be the only one. I just fundamentally don't trust cryptocurrencies as they're currently managed and regulated, and feel like anything to do with them is shady af.

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Even in the anti-repression use case, Bitcoin advocates are way too sanguine about the network’s ability to withstand an attack from a great power, or even just a Soros-style currency trader. Bitcoin has a market cap in the hundreds of billions, but it looks like you could duplicate the existing the existing hash power (ie carry out a 51% attack) for low tens of billions if you paid retail for your equipment. Setting aside everything else a state actor could do, and any dynamic effects on the price of BTC, that sets a pretty low ceiling on the price to take down the network.

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Great post Tim!

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