Report: Indian government is planning outright ban on cryptocurrency

The proposed bill would ban trading, mining, and even holding cryptocurrencies.

Read the whole story

 

[kmmatney]

The whole crypto currency business just seems screwed up - it's completely skewed towards whoever can get the cheapest power (e.g. Warehouse in China near a hydro dam). If you care about the environment, seem like most countries should ban it's use.

 

[simon5701]

But if you ban the cryptocurrency it means only the criminals will have cryptocurrency!

I find that offensive. The so-called "criminals" are really the true giants of our society. Slowly they will disappear and communists and unproductive bureaucrats will take their places. Eventually we'll find out the economy will crash without the power of cryptocurrency.

Then the governments of the world will attempt to take over everyone's money in the bank, and finally Satoshi Nakamoto emerges out of a ranch in Colorado to tell us that we need to fight against the corrupt centralized government-led monetary system.

People listen. The governments officials go mad. Biden offers Nakamoto the combined chair of the Federal Reserve/IMF/WorldBank. But Nakamoto - surrounded by fighter drones and robot waifus all made possible by bitcoin - simply says "no". A short pandemonium briefly follows but bitcoins and other cryptos make a quick work of the recovery afterward.

Dollars become useless. But the internet is kept alive by our heroes and cryptos persist. Cold wallets have become the norm and everything is tracked and kept organized by distributed ledgers. The humanity sees a level of productivity never thought to be possible.

So yeah, let's not ban crypto.

 

[johnsonwax]

This is my 1st post here (long time lurker here) and I will probably be downvoted into oblivion. But I am surprised how many here know little about Crypto and that "its largely pointless" is the common perception. Specially when Proof-of-stake systems don't have the negatives of Bitcoin.

Honest question, how many here own (or have owned) Crypto that are calling it "useless"? Be honest! I have a difficult time accepting a regular Ars reader has never owned some.

I've never owned any. My issue with crypto is that it seems reliant on getting out before the inefficiencies make it impossible to get out. Say what you will about fiat currencies, the cost of a transaction is low and relatively fixed, and it's basically indexed to the aggregate value of the economy.

Right now the cost of a bitcoin transaction of any size is $25.68. That massively limits the utility of bitcoin, and it demands that bitcoin be massively and permanently inflationary. We've seen this dynamic in the subprime lending market. So long as the market is sufficiently inflationary, it holds together. As soon as that ends, it collapses. That's what was behind the Gamestop short squeeze as well. It 'worked' so long as it was sustained.

So, roughly speaking, in the end half the people in bitcoin will make money and half will lose, and the signal which determines which camp you are in is completely invisible.

 

[jimisawesome]

I'm all for it. It's high time for this energy-sucking scam to be legislated away. It has 0 benefit for humanity.

Hey now, how else am I supposed to pay for small arms? Or my 10 metric ton heroin shipment? Or get paid in my latest black mail scheme?

 

[jhodge]

But if you ban the cryptocurrency it means only the criminals will have cryptocurrency!

I find that offensive. The so-called "criminals" are really the true giants of our society. Slowly they will disappear and communists and unproductive bureaucrats will take their places. Eventually we'll find out the economy will crash without the power of cryptocurrency.

Then the governments of the world will attempt to take over everyone's money in the bank, and finally Satoshi Nakamoto emerges out of a ranch in Colorado to tell us that we need to fight against the corrupt centralized government-led monetary system.

People listen. The governments officials go mad. Biden offers Nakamoto the combined chair of the Federal Reserve/IMF/WorldBank. But Nakamoto - surrounded by fighter drones and robot waifus all made possible by bitcoin - simply says "no". A short pandemonium briefly follows but bitcoins and other cryptos make a quick work of the recovery afterward.

Dollars become useless. But the internet is kept alive by our heroes and cryptos persist. Cold wallets have become the norm and everything is tracked and kept organized by distributed ledgers. The humanity sees a level of productivity never thought to be possible.

So yeah, let's not ban crypto.

I admire the way you've walked that fine line between humor and Ayn-Randian libertarian cultism. At least, that's what I'm hoping you were aiming for...

 

[orwelldesign]

This is my 1st post here (long time lurker here) and I will probably be downvoted into oblivion. But I am surprised how many here know little about Crypto and that "its largely pointless" is the common perception. Specially when Proof-of-stake systems don't have the negatives of Bitcoin.

Honest question, how many here own (or have owned) Crypto that are calling it "useless"? Be honest! I have a difficult time accepting a regular Ars reader has never owned some.

I bought 35 bucks on coinbase six weeks ago just so that people would stop using this as an argument. People are allowed to have opinions about things they don't personally do or own, and I presume everyone here is arguing in good faith, both pro and con. It's pretty gauche to assume that everyone who hasn't reached your conclusions is necessarily ignorant.

It is useless as anything other than a speculative vehicle. Oh, sorry, "investment." There's literally nothing I need from my money that fiat currency doesn't already provide. I get paid in dollars, pay taxes in dollars, buy everything in dollars, etc. The very best part of this is that I get paid the same amount of dollars every week, because my mortgage is denominated in dollars. If I were paid in crypto, I'd have no idea what percent +/- each week, relatively. I don't have 10% swings in my earnings or my costs on a daily basis.

I'm capable of learning, though, so if there's some use case I'm missing -- for my fairly straightforward life -- let me know. I'm not saying there aren't niche uses for some people, I'm just saying that in the "i work for a living, i pay a mortgage, and I'm sending kids to college" world that I live in, crypto isn't necessary. For anything.

There's a lot of negatives about BTC, and.. it's fairly unlikely that proof-of-stake fixes all the negatives. Just sayin´.

 

[LongTimeLurker629]

This is my 1st post here (long time lurker here) and I will probably be downvoted into oblivion. But I am surprised how many here know little about Crypto and that "its largely pointless" is the common perception. Specially when Proof-of-stake systems don't have the negatives of Bitcoin.

Honest question, how many here own (or have owned) Crypto that are calling it "useless"? Be honest! I have a difficult time accepting a regular Ars reader has never owned some.

I have owned crypto, was enthused by the novelty of a trustless distributed ledger, and have since soured strongly on it when the gold rush happened and it became speculator's frenzy. Crypto has failed at ALL (okay, most of) its promises and enabled new kinds of ills, including the most despicable scourge of ransomware. There are thousands of alt-coins, algorithms, concepts, and perhaps a small percentage truly is trying, but the vast majority of the movement in crypto right now I bet is crime and greed driven speculation. I'd be much more optimistic if any modern coin was racing ahead of bitcoin, but that's not the case. All improvements to crypto are just feeding the bitcoin monster and helping propagate the priesthood of greed and antisocial fantasies. I'll wait until bitcoin is dying to give the emerging crypto world a new look see if it finally has any redeeming qualities. I know it will never fully die, dogecoin was a satire and remains strong and kicking, but please let it be surpassed in usage by another coin and be abandoned by the masses and kept only by collectors.

 

[johnsonwax]

But if you ban the cryptocurrency it means only the criminals will have cryptocurrency!

I find that offensive. The so-called "criminals" are really the true giants of our society. Slowly they will disappear and communists and unproductive bureaucrats will take their places. Eventually we'll find out the economy will crash without the power of cryptocurrency.

Then the governments of the world will attempt to take over everyone's money in the bank, and finally Satoshi Nakamoto emerges out of a ranch in Colorado to tell us that we need to fight against the corrupt centralized government-led monetary system.

People listen. The governments officials go mad. Biden offers Nakamoto the combined chair of the Federal Reserve/IMF/WorldBank. But Nakamoto - surrounded by fighter drones and robot waifus all made possible by bitcoin - simply says "no". A short pandemonium briefly follows but bitcoins and other cryptos make a quick work of the recovery afterward.

Dollars become useless. But the internet is kept alive by our heroes and cryptos persist. Cold wallets have become the norm and everything is tracked and kept organized by distributed ledgers. The humanity sees a level of productivity never thought to be possible.

So yeah, let's not ban crypto.

But will it be worth it if only Nakamoto gets to have robot waifus? I say no. Robot waifus for all!

Plus we already know that the currency of end state capitalism is bottle caps. We've known that for 25 years.

 

[dylane]

Okay, I'll bite. Describe for me a specific example of a case where "decentralized finance" would make life concretely better than it is now in some significant way.

Apparently you can't be bothered to actually spend 30 seconds to google this but I'll go ahead and give you some of my time and write you this response. Not sure why, to be honest, because you seem closed-minded about the subject already, but here goes.

DeFi concretely makes life better for some people in small but meaningful ways:

•1 DeFi does not require an intermediary, which mitigates several issues and inefficiencies.

•2 DeFi markets and credit facilities are open 24/7/365; no need to wait for the bank to open.

•3 DeFi is open to anyone, even if they have bad credit. No closed doors because someone stole your identity and ruined your credit, for example. Many more reasons why this is good. Some reasons why this could be bad.

1. Is not the transaction cost an "intermediary" in a structural sense? This bullet point is vague to the point of uselessness; I genuinely don't know what you mean or even what could be meant.

2. Doesn't venmo/cashapp/paypal cover this use case? I used venmo this morning to pay for breakfast. Instantly.

3. I'm having trouble, conceptually, with the idea of giving people loans without doing due diligence -- "can the person I'm loaning money to pay me back" seems like the key factor in deciding whether or not to loan them the money. I mean, overextended credit was the problem in the subprime mortgage crisis, so how is "DeFi" not an over-leveraged unsecured debt market? Is it just because the insecurity is spread across the entire system?

---

None of this addresses the real problem with cryptocurrency, the baked-in deflationary nature. Deflation discourages economic activity -- strongly -- and is rightly feared by economists.

Let's get ridiculous and say that BTC is going to infinity. I mean,.. let's make the numbers manageable and pretend right now it's 50k, and that it could go to a million. I've seen that said -- BTC to a million; it makes the math easier, because that's 20x what it's worth now.

For every single purchase you make with BTC, you shouldn't really think of it as the current value, but the expected value. Which means -- your 50 dollar movie night with your partner actually "costs" you 1000 dollars. Would I spend 1000 bucks to go to the theatre? No, I wouldn't. Because I'd rather have 1000 bucks in two years than a date with my wife. That vacation we're planning? 3500 bucks? That's 70k in future-BTC! That new car? 600k. Nope, I'll make this one last as long as it can.

So it is with all purchases in a deflationary economy. You shouldn't set up your economy in a way that so very strongly discourages any luxury spending... It's bad for your monetary velocity. If no one's buying anything at all because hey, in two years BTC will be a million bucks per, discretionary spending should drop to near zero. New paperback? Not for 200 bucks, no way.

You really, really don't want discretionary spending to dry up, or cease altogether. That'd be "bad."

If that isn't the case -- if someone has done away with the fundamental problem of a deflationary-by-design model, I'm all ears. I haven't come across anything other than hand-wavey bull.

The point about deflationary assets is a good one, but given the power of compounding, that's true of anything you buy when you could have invested the money itself. Young Warren Buffett was apparently famous in his family for saying things like, "Do I want to pay $300,000 for this haircut?"

I don't want this to be construed as being a bitcoin bull, I'm not, but neither am I a complete skeptic. So many bulls and bears seem to think in totality, that bitcoin is either going to take over the world or go to zero, that there is no middle ground or room for bitcoin (or something like it) to serve a purpose somewhere in the middle.

rn mentioned one of these reasons above, which is what if you live somewhere you can't trust the central authority. That's not a small number of people, depending on your definitions, something like half to 2/3rds of the world live under authoritarian regimes. In general, I think there is demand for being able to move semi-large funds around the globe in a way that can't easily be stopped by authorities. Some of these are for nefarious purposes, but others might be to get support to persecuted minorities where other methods are blocked.

Even something like the fragmented state of the cannabis market in the U.S., where even where it is legal, growers and dispensers have difficulty accessing the financial services available to most other businesses, should give pause to thinking that there are no uses for a decentralized currency in the developed world.

 

[LongTimeLurker629]

Okay, I'll bite. Describe for me a specific example of a case where "decentralized finance" would make life concretely better than it is now in some significant way.

Apparently you can't be bothered to actually spend 30 seconds to google this but I'll go ahead and give you some of my time and write you this response. Not sure why, to be honest, because you seem closed-minded about the subject already, but here goes.

DeFi concretely makes life better for some people in small but meaningful ways:

•1 DeFi does not require an intermediary, which mitigates several issues and inefficiencies.

•2 DeFi markets and credit facilities are open 24/7/365; no need to wait for the bank to open.

•3 DeFi is open to anyone, even if they have bad credit. No closed doors because someone stole your identity and ruined your credit, for example. Many more reasons why this is good. Some reasons why this could be bad.

1. Is not the transaction cost an "intermediary" in a structural sense? This bullet point is vague to the point of uselessness; I genuinely don't know what you mean or even what could be meant.

2. Doesn't venmo/cashapp/paypal cover this use case? I used venmo this morning to pay for breakfast. Instantly.

3. I'm having trouble, conceptually, with the idea of giving people loans without doing due diligence -- "can the person I'm loaning money to pay me back" seems like the key factor in deciding whether or not to loan them the money. I mean, overextended credit was the problem in the subprime mortgage crisis, so how is "DeFi" not an over-leveraged unsecured debt market? Is it just because the insecurity is spread across the entire system?

---

None of this addresses the real problem with cryptocurrency, the baked-in deflationary nature. Deflation discourages economic activity -- strongly -- and is rightly feared by economists.

Let's get ridiculous and say that BTC is going to infinity. I mean,.. let's make the numbers manageable and pretend right now it's 50k, and that it could go to a million. I've seen that said -- BTC to a million; it makes the math easier, because that's 20x what it's worth now.

For every single purchase you make with BTC, you shouldn't really think of it as the current value, but the expected value. Which means -- your 50 dollar movie night with your partner actually "costs" you 1000 dollars. Would I spend 1000 bucks to go to the theatre? No, I wouldn't. Because I'd rather have 1000 bucks in two years than a date with my wife. That vacation we're planning? 3500 bucks? That's 70k in future-BTC! That new car? 600k. Nope, I'll make this one last as long as it can.

So it is with all purchases in a deflationary economy. You shouldn't set up your economy in a way that so very strongly discourages any luxury spending... It's bad for your monetary velocity. If no one's buying anything at all because hey, in two years BTC will be a million bucks per, discretionary spending should drop to near zero. New paperback? Not for 200 bucks, no way.

You really, really don't want discretionary spending to dry up, or cease altogether. That'd be "bad."

If that isn't the case -- if someone has done away with the fundamental problem of a deflationary-by-design model, I'm all ears. I haven't come across anything other than hand-wavey bull.

The point about deflationary assets is a good one, but given the power of compounding, that's true of anything you buy when you could have invested the money itself. Young Warren Buffett was apparently famous in his family for saying things like, "Do I want to pay $300,000 for this haircut?"

I don't want this to be construed as being a bitcoin bull, I'm not, but neither am I a complete skeptic. So many bulls and bears seem to think in totality, that bitcoin is either going to take over the world or go to zero, that there is no middle ground or room for bitcoin (or something like it) to serve a purpose somewhere in the middle.

rn mentioned one of these reasons above, which is what if you live somewhere you can't trust the central authority. That's not a small number of people, depending on your definitions, something like half to 2/3rds of the world live under authoritarian regimes. In general, I think there is demand for being able to move semi-large funds around the globe in a way that can't easily be stopped by authorities. Some of these are for nefarious purposes, but others might be to get support to persecuted minorities where other methods are blocked.

Even something like the fragmented state of the cannabis market in the U.S., where even where it is legal, growers and dispensers have difficulty accessing the financial services available to most other businesses, should give pause to thinking that there are no uses for a decentralized currency in the developed world.

F off... it takes about 100 years for 20$ to become 300k at 10% annual compounding interest.

And that's without accounting for inflation, against inflation you can probably get at most 5% and that requires 200 years beating inflation at 5% which is better than the market in the last 50 years.

Notice that bitcoin already achieved this according to the pizza tracker https://bitcoinpizzaindex.net/ and that's just a decade. Current bitcoin prices mean the coin is broken beyond redemption, and worse, energy waste correlates directly with the price until the next halving in 2024, so quite a few years of eco-waste ahead of us.

EDIT: seems in the last 50 years, returns adjusted for inflation from the market is 6%, so not better than the market, but the point remains: https://www.fool.com/investing/how-to-i ... et-return/

 

[rm]

I sort of understand crypto and in many ways I don’t. I keep hearing how crypto can be used in unstable countries and save the poor but how are these poor people supposed to have the infrastructure to mine/buy/transact/save their cryptos? How do you trust the one crypto amongst so many?
If I have crypto and you accept only krypto what’s the exchange rate for our transaction?
My 100 cryptos are worth 1000 “real” money today, 10,000 tomorrow and 50 the day after. Am I going to be timing my Costco purchases to get the best deal on the hotdogs?
Don’t expect you to answer each of my questions but would appreciate an unbiased internet resource that is not peddling their own utopian currency.

> how are these poor people supposed to have the infrastructure to mine/buy/transact/save their cryptos?
Internet and cell networks are fairly ubiquitous even now.

> How do you trust the one crypto amongst so many?
Trust? Maybe how does a group settle on which crypto they will use? Depends on their needs but my assumption in the coming years, people will settle on those that are proven to be widely adopted, low-fee/feeless. Kind of like messaging platforms. Why do I use Telegram? Because people I know use Telegram.

> If I have crypto and you accept only krypto what’s the exchange rate for our transaction?
Decentralized exchanges are here already and in a short time, they will be very functional. Market will always set the exchange rate.

> My 100 cryptos are worth 1000 “real” money today, 10,000 tomorrow and 50 the day after. Am I going to be timing my Costco purchases to get the best deal on the hotdogs?
That's probably going to be a problem for a long time/always be a problem but in my use case, I'm not thinking people are on/off ramping to local currency much since that is the problem they are trying to avoid. But all money has this problem to a lesser or greater extent.

> Don’t expect you to answer each of my questions but would appreciate an unbiased internet resource that is not peddling their own utopian currency.

I personally am not thinking of crypto as a solution to practical problems today or tomorrow but in the future. We are super early on this technology and there are a lot of issues that have yet to be solved. Everyone thinks things have to happen in 5 minutes or it's not real. Societal shifts take generational change.

As I already mentioned Tron Black, Ravencoin developer gives every interesting interview and he really not selling Ravencoin if you find one that is about his general blockchain views. You are not going to find a truly disinterested party who also knows blockchain well.

 

[samcantrell]

But if you ban the cryptocurrency it means only the criminals will have cryptocurrency!

I find that offensive. The so-called "criminals" are really the true giants of our society. Slowly they will disappear and communists and unproductive bureaucrats will take their places. Eventually we'll find out the economy will crash without the power of cryptocurrency.

Then the governments of the world will attempt to take over everyone's money in the bank, and finally Satoshi Nakamoto emerges out of a ranch in Colorado to tell us that we need to fight against the corrupt centralized government-led monetary system.

People listen. The governments officials go mad. Biden offers Nakamoto the combined chair of the Federal Reserve/IMF/WorldBank. But Nakamoto - surrounded by fighter drones and robot waifus all made possible by bitcoin - simply says "no". A short pandemonium briefly follows but bitcoins and other cryptos make a quick work of the recovery afterward.

Dollars become useless. But the internet is kept alive by our heroes and cryptos persist. Cold wallets have become the norm and everything is tracked and kept organized by distributed ledgers. The humanity sees a level of productivity never thought to be possible.

So yeah, let's not ban crypto.

*golf clap*

But what's telling is that at first I thought you were completely serious, so breathless many crypto enthusiasts are.

 

[John Savard]

If you do proper research you'll find that India is much more democratic than many 'labelled' democracies.

That's simply absurd.
India is currently led by the BJP, which openly espouses laws that discriminate against anyone in India who is not a Hindu.

 

[simon5701]

But if you ban the cryptocurrency it means only the criminals will have cryptocurrency!

I find that offensive. The so-called "criminals" are really the true giants of our society. Slowly they will disappear and communists and unproductive bureaucrats will take their places. Eventually we'll find out the economy will crash without the power of cryptocurrency.

Then the governments of the world will attempt to take over everyone's money in the bank, and finally Satoshi Nakamoto emerges out of a ranch in Colorado to tell us that we need to fight against the corrupt centralized government-led monetary system.

People listen. The governments officials go mad. Biden offers Nakamoto the combined chair of the Federal Reserve/IMF/WorldBank. But Nakamoto - surrounded by fighter drones and robot waifus all made possible by bitcoin - simply says "no". A short pandemonium briefly follows but bitcoins and other cryptos make a quick work of the recovery afterward.

Dollars become useless. But the internet is kept alive by our heroes and cryptos persist. Cold wallets have become the norm and everything is tracked and kept organized by distributed ledgers. The humanity sees a level of productivity never thought to be possible.

So yeah, let's not ban crypto.

I admire the way you've walked that fine line between humor and Ayn-Randian libertarian cultism. At least, that's what I'm hoping you were aiming for...

I was hoping the mere presence of the robot waifus in my story would make it crystal clear that I am completely support this version of the future and would welcome our crypto overloads with wide open arms as long as we get a choice in which robot waifu we receive.

I do apologize for not mentioning robot husbandos. But you'd better believe they will be available.

 

[mohnish82]

"Officials seem to be worried that ordinary Indian consumers could make bad cryptocurrency bets and lose their savings as a result. "

Oh horseshit. They just can't figure out how to get their cut. I don't have a dog in the fight either way but there's basically zero chance that caring about the wellbeing of others is a major factor here.

As I see it, first reason is to stop "illegal funding" for anti-India activities. Second, to stop corruption, black-money and scams as reported. So, it's indeed for the well-being for its citizens.

The recent two measures by Indian govt. - 24*7 operation of the (free) inter bank fund transfer (NEFT) scheme & requiring all payment apps to support the standardized UPI payment platform precede this crypto ban. So, the govt. made prior accommodations to not cause any public inconvenience. Now you can relax your "horseshit/cut/zero-chance" narrative.

 

[Inaksa]

Good thing, for the wrong reason, but living in a 3rd world country with record inflation (only surpassed by Venezuela?) I may understand why people would have their savings in another currency that is not local.

Given that, I still think that mining should be banned... either you provide something of value to the society or your electricty is cut. But people says I am an extremist.

I wonder if the timing of this announcement has anything to do with BTC dropping 5 thousand dollars overnight.

nah that is par for the course... BTC has never been "stable" and it's progression is not monotonous ascending/descending, and given the volatility involved in it's trading changing 10k in a day is not surprising.

 

[HexRei]

Good thing, for the wrong reason, but living in a 3rd world country with record inflation (only surpassed by Venezuela?) I may understand why people would have their savings in another currency that is not local.

Given that, I still think that mining should be banned... either you provide something of value to the society or your electricty is cut. But people says I am an extremist.

The irony is that with your philosophy, we might as well cut your electricity to save the world. Who actually gains from hearing your opinion, in a provable sense?

 

[dylane]

Okay, I'll bite. Describe for me a specific example of a case where "decentralized finance" would make life concretely better than it is now in some significant way.

Apparently you can't be bothered to actually spend 30 seconds to google this but I'll go ahead and give you some of my time and write you this response. Not sure why, to be honest, because you seem closed-minded about the subject already, but here goes.

DeFi concretely makes life better for some people in small but meaningful ways:

•1 DeFi does not require an intermediary, which mitigates several issues and inefficiencies.

•2 DeFi markets and credit facilities are open 24/7/365; no need to wait for the bank to open.

•3 DeFi is open to anyone, even if they have bad credit. No closed doors because someone stole your identity and ruined your credit, for example. Many more reasons why this is good. Some reasons why this could be bad.

1. Is not the transaction cost an "intermediary" in a structural sense? This bullet point is vague to the point of uselessness; I genuinely don't know what you mean or even what could be meant.

2. Doesn't venmo/cashapp/paypal cover this use case? I used venmo this morning to pay for breakfast. Instantly.

3. I'm having trouble, conceptually, with the idea of giving people loans without doing due diligence -- "can the person I'm loaning money to pay me back" seems like the key factor in deciding whether or not to loan them the money. I mean, overextended credit was the problem in the subprime mortgage crisis, so how is "DeFi" not an over-leveraged unsecured debt market? Is it just because the insecurity is spread across the entire system?

---

None of this addresses the real problem with cryptocurrency, the baked-in deflationary nature. Deflation discourages economic activity -- strongly -- and is rightly feared by economists.

Let's get ridiculous and say that BTC is going to infinity. I mean,.. let's make the numbers manageable and pretend right now it's 50k, and that it could go to a million. I've seen that said -- BTC to a million; it makes the math easier, because that's 20x what it's worth now.

For every single purchase you make with BTC, you shouldn't really think of it as the current value, but the expected value. Which means -- your 50 dollar movie night with your partner actually "costs" you 1000 dollars. Would I spend 1000 bucks to go to the theatre? No, I wouldn't. Because I'd rather have 1000 bucks in two years than a date with my wife. That vacation we're planning? 3500 bucks? That's 70k in future-BTC! That new car? 600k. Nope, I'll make this one last as long as it can.

So it is with all purchases in a deflationary economy. You shouldn't set up your economy in a way that so very strongly discourages any luxury spending... It's bad for your monetary velocity. If no one's buying anything at all because hey, in two years BTC will be a million bucks per, discretionary spending should drop to near zero. New paperback? Not for 200 bucks, no way.

You really, really don't want discretionary spending to dry up, or cease altogether. That'd be "bad."

If that isn't the case -- if someone has done away with the fundamental problem of a deflationary-by-design model, I'm all ears. I haven't come across anything other than hand-wavey bull.

The point about deflationary assets is a good one, but given the power of compounding, that's true of anything you buy when you could have invested the money itself. Young Warren Buffett was apparently famous in his family for saying things like, "Do I want to pay $300,000 for this haircut?"

I don't want this to be construed as being a bitcoin bull, I'm not, but neither am I a complete skeptic. So many bulls and bears seem to think in totality, that bitcoin is either going to take over the world or go to zero, that there is no middle ground or room for bitcoin (or something like it) to serve a purpose somewhere in the middle.

rn mentioned one of these reasons above, which is what if you live somewhere you can't trust the central authority. That's not a small number of people, depending on your definitions, something like half to 2/3rds of the world live under authoritarian regimes. In general, I think there is demand for being able to move semi-large funds around the globe in a way that can't easily be stopped by authorities. Some of these are for nefarious purposes, but others might be to get support to persecuted minorities where other methods are blocked.

Even something like the fragmented state of the cannabis market in the U.S., where even where it is legal, growers and dispensers have difficulty accessing the financial services available to most other businesses, should give pause to thinking that there are no uses for a decentralized currency in the developed world.

F off... it takes about 100 years for 20$ to become 300k at 10% annual compounding interest.

And that's without accounting for inflation, against inflation you can probably get at most 5% and that requires 200 years beating inflation at 5% which is better than the market in the last 50 years.

Notice that bitcoin already achieved this according to the pizza tracker https://bitcoinpizzaindex.net/ and that's just a decade. Current bitcoin prices mean the coin is broken beyond redemption, and worse, energy waste correlates directly with the price until the next halving in 2024, so quite a few years of eco-waste ahead of us.

The haircut example is the title of a piece on Warren Buffett.

https://www.morningstar.com/news/dow-jo ... 00-haircut

So blame him, or the reporter, or the faulty memories of his family and friends. The point wasn't supposed to be about amounts anyway, just that this basic idea that no one would buy anything they don't have to, because the asset will be worth more in the future. That's a problem we already have, but it's mitigated quite a bit by the fact that most people prefer to consume today rather than 100 years in the future.

Yes, bitcoin has appreciated by orders of magnitude more over the last decade than whatever a normal, diversified portfolio has done. No one expects that to go on forever though, rates of growth inevitably have to slow down. The deflationary aspect that people talk about is the fact that eventually, no more coins will be mined, and that the supply will eventually shrink as coins are lost. As long as bitcoin sits alongside other currencies and the world doesn't move to a "bitcoin standard" though, that doesn't seem like much of a problem.

 

[mohnish82]

Good thing, for the wrong reason, but living in a 3rd world country with record inflation (only surpassed by Venezuela?) I may understand why people would have their savings in another currency that is not local.

Given that, I still think that mining should be banned... either you provide something of value to the society or your electricty is cut. But people says I am an extremist.

I wonder if the timing of this announcement has anything to do with BTC dropping 5 thousand dollars overnight.

nah that is par for the course... BTC has never been "stable" and it's progression is not monotonous ascending/descending, and given the volatility involved in it's trading changing 10k in a day is not surprising.

[[ removed ]]

 

[James Rivington]

I can't believe this has gone on as long as it has without any government oversight. While I'm sure there are plenty of legit users and purposes, there are also a shit ton of criminals relying on it. It's time to lock it down.

I would suggest that many of these so-called "criminals" are only criminals because they are in violation of stupid made-up laws. As others have said, many of these made-up laws are because the government, at all levels, has a pathological FOMO.

Just today, I got an email from NORML advising me that the alcohol and tobacco cartels are mounting a major anti-cannabis-legalization lobbying effort. Because they are concerned about our health, I'm sure.

Since all laws are "made-up", I'd appreciate it if you clarify your assertion a bit. IMO, banking and securities laws that ensure that the average person can have confidence in the currency and the institutions that handle it are a good thing, and have benefitted us greatly.

Happy to clarify. Note that I never said "All laws are made up". And I think you know that.

Just a few of the laws that I consider stupid and counter-productive: Drug laws, blue laws, vocational licensing laws, anti-money-laundering laws, many immigration laws. The question is always, who benefits from enforcing a particular made-up law? Put another way, whose cronies benefit?

The application to crypto prohibition might be, in my opinion, that the government prohibits so many perfectly reasonable activities that people who participate in those activities are highly motivated to go underground. Thus, the government's war on crypto, especially in countries where everything "the serfs" do is de-facto illegal. Note that somebody also mentioned the Indian government's "war on cash". What about the US war on cash?

The US used to have a $500 bill. Here's what Wikipedia says that the Federal Reserve said about that:

"There are public policies against reissuing the $500 note, mainly because many of those efficiency gains, such as lower shipment and storage costs, would accrue not only to legitimate users of bank notes but also to money launderers, tax evaders and a variety of other lawbreakers who use currency in their criminal activity. While it is not at all clear that the volume of illegal drugs sold or the amount of tax evasion would necessarily increase just as a consequence of the availability of a larger dollar denomination bill, it no doubt is the case that if wrongdoers were provided with an easier mechanism to launder their funds and hide their profits, enforcement authorities could have a harder time detecting certain illicit transactions occurring in cash.[15]"

So, you see, it's all about those nasty wrongdoers. No mention of alcohol or tobacco, just those nasty drug users. Just wait until the US abolishes the $100 bill. Imagine trying to buy or sell a used car worth, say $20,000, using $20 bills. I did it once, using $100 bills, and it was very difficult for both parties. And keep in mind, selling a car is a publicly recorded event. Nothing nefarious, but banks will no longer accept cashiers checks. So it's either electronic EFT, bank-to-bank, or it's a shoe box full of cash. Super convenient.

Wikipedia also mentions that today's $100 bill was worth almost $700 in 1969. So, it might be might handy if we could have a few $500 bills available today.

I hope that helps.

 

[jhodge]

I can't believe this has gone on as long as it has without any government oversight. While I'm sure there are plenty of legit users and purposes, there are also a shit ton of criminals relying on it. It's time to lock it down.

I would suggest that many of these so-called "criminals" are only criminals because they are in violation of stupid made-up laws. As others have said, many of these made-up laws are because the government, at all levels, has a pathological FOMO.

Just today, I got an email from NORML advising me that the alcohol and tobacco cartels are mounting a major anti-cannabis-legalization lobbying effort. Because they are concerned about our health, I'm sure.

Since all laws are "made-up", I'd appreciate it if you clarify your assertion a bit. IMO, banking and securities laws that ensure that the average person can have confidence in the currency and the institutions that handle it are a good thing, and have benefitted us greatly.

Happy to clarify. Note that I never said "All laws are made up". And I think you know that.

Just a few of the laws that I consider stupid and counter-productive: Drug laws, blue laws, vocational licensing laws, anti-money-laundering laws, many immigration laws. The question is always, who benefits from enforcing a particular made-up law? Put another way, whose cronies benefit?

The application to crypto prohibition might be, in my opinion, that the government prohibits so many perfectly reasonable activities that people who participate in those activities are highly motivated to go underground. Thus, the government's war on crypto, especially in countries where everything "the serfs" do is de-facto illegal. Note that somebody also mentioned the Indian government's "war on cash". What about the US war on cash?

The US used to have a $500 bill. Here's what Wikipedia says that the Federal Reserve said about that:

"There are public policies against reissuing the $500 note, mainly because many of those efficiency gains, such as lower shipment and storage costs, would accrue not only to legitimate users of bank notes but also to money launderers, tax evaders and a variety of other lawbreakers who use currency in their criminal activity. While it is not at all clear that the volume of illegal drugs sold or the amount of tax evasion would necessarily increase just as a consequence of the availability of a larger dollar denomination bill, it no doubt is the case that if wrongdoers were provided with an easier mechanism to launder their funds and hide their profits, enforcement authorities could have a harder time detecting certain illicit transactions occurring in cash.[15]"

So, you see, it's all about those nasty wrongdoers. No mention of alcohol or tobacco, just those nasty drug users. Just wait until the US abolishes the $100 bill. Imagine trying to buy or sell a used car worth, say $20,000, using $20 bills. I did it once, using $100 bills, and it was very difficult for both parties. And keep in mind, selling a car is a publicly recorded event. Nothing nefarious, but banks will no longer accept cashiers checks. So it's either electronic EFT, bank-to-bank, or it's a shoe box full of cash. Super convenient.

Wikipedia also mentions that today's $100 bill was worth almost $700 in 1969. So, it might be might handy if we could have a few $500 bills available today.

I hope that helps.

Re: "all laws are made up" - I know you didn't say that. I did. Just now, because they are.

 

[James Rivington]

I can't believe this has gone on as long as it has without any government oversight. While I'm sure there are plenty of legit users and purposes, there are also a shit ton of criminals relying on it. It's time to lock it down.

I would suggest that many of these so-called "criminals" are only criminals because they are in violation of stupid made-up laws. As others have said, many of these made-up laws are because the government, at all levels, has a pathological FOMO.

Just today, I got an email from NORML advising me that the alcohol and tobacco cartels are mounting a major anti-cannabis-legalization lobbying effort. Because they are concerned about our health, I'm sure.

Since all laws are "made-up", I'd appreciate it if you clarify your assertion a bit. IMO, banking and securities laws that ensure that the average person can have confidence in the currency and the institutions that handle it are a good thing, and have benefitted us greatly.

Happy to clarify. Note that I never said "All laws are made up". And I think you know that.

Just a few of the laws that I consider stupid and counter-productive: Drug laws, blue laws, vocational licensing laws, anti-money-laundering laws, many immigration laws. The question is always, who benefits from enforcing a particular made-up law? Put another way, whose cronies benefit?

The application to crypto prohibition might be, in my opinion, that the government prohibits so many perfectly reasonable activities that people who participate in those activities are highly motivated to go underground. Thus, the government's war on crypto, especially in countries where everything "the serfs" do is de-facto illegal. Note that somebody also mentioned the Indian government's "war on cash". What about the US war on cash?

The US used to have a $500 bill. Here's what Wikipedia says that the Federal Reserve said about that:

"There are public policies against reissuing the $500 note, mainly because many of those efficiency gains, such as lower shipment and storage costs, would accrue not only to legitimate users of bank notes but also to money launderers, tax evaders and a variety of other lawbreakers who use currency in their criminal activity. While it is not at all clear that the volume of illegal drugs sold or the amount of tax evasion would necessarily increase just as a consequence of the availability of a larger dollar denomination bill, it no doubt is the case that if wrongdoers were provided with an easier mechanism to launder their funds and hide their profits, enforcement authorities could have a harder time detecting certain illicit transactions occurring in cash.[15]"

So, you see, it's all about those nasty wrongdoers. No mention of alcohol or tobacco, just those nasty drug users. Just wait until the US abolishes the $100 bill. Imagine trying to buy or sell a used car worth, say $20,000, using $20 bills. I did it once, using $100 bills, and it was very difficult for both parties. And keep in mind, selling a car is a publicly recorded event. Nothing nefarious, but banks will no longer accept cashiers checks. So it's either electronic EFT, bank-to-bank, or it's a shoe box full of cash. Super convenient.

Wikipedia also mentions that today's $100 bill was worth almost $700 in 1969. So, it might be might handy if we could have a few $500 bills available today.

I hope that helps.

Re: "all laws are made up" - I know you didn't say that. I did. Just now, because they are.

OK, understood.

 

[dimathiel]

But if you ban the cryptocurrency it means only the criminals will have cryptocurrency!

Executive Order 6102

 

[shinraius]

This could be the beginning.

India is part of the quad group: US, Japan, India and Australia. They just had a meeting and India then does this. Suspicious!

 

[orwelldesign]

Okay, I'll bite. Describe for me a specific example of a case where "decentralized finance" would make life concretely better than it is now in some significant way.

Apparently you can't be bothered to actually spend 30 seconds to google this but I'll go ahead and give you some of my time and write you this response. Not sure why, to be honest, because you seem closed-minded about the subject already, but here goes.

DeFi concretely makes life better for some people in small but meaningful ways:

•1 DeFi does not require an intermediary, which mitigates several issues and inefficiencies.

•2 DeFi markets and credit facilities are open 24/7/365; no need to wait for the bank to open.

•3 DeFi is open to anyone, even if they have bad credit. No closed doors because someone stole your identity and ruined your credit, for example. Many more reasons why this is good. Some reasons why this could be bad.

1. Is not the transaction cost an "intermediary" in a structural sense? This bullet point is vague to the point of uselessness; I genuinely don't know what you mean or even what could be meant.

2. Doesn't venmo/cashapp/paypal cover this use case? I used venmo this morning to pay for breakfast. Instantly.

3. I'm having trouble, conceptually, with the idea of giving people loans without doing due diligence -- "can the person I'm loaning money to pay me back" seems like the key factor in deciding whether or not to loan them the money. I mean, overextended credit was the problem in the subprime mortgage crisis, so how is "DeFi" not an over-leveraged unsecured debt market? Is it just because the insecurity is spread across the entire system?

---

None of this addresses the real problem with cryptocurrency, the baked-in deflationary nature. Deflation discourages economic activity -- strongly -- and is rightly feared by economists.

Let's get ridiculous and say that BTC is going to infinity. I mean,.. let's make the numbers manageable and pretend right now it's 50k, and that it could go to a million. I've seen that said -- BTC to a million; it makes the math easier, because that's 20x what it's worth now.

For every single purchase you make with BTC, you shouldn't really think of it as the current value, but the expected value. Which means -- your 50 dollar movie night with your partner actually "costs" you 1000 dollars. Would I spend 1000 bucks to go to the theatre? No, I wouldn't. Because I'd rather have 1000 bucks in two years than a date with my wife. That vacation we're planning? 3500 bucks? That's 70k in future-BTC! That new car? 600k. Nope, I'll make this one last as long as it can.

So it is with all purchases in a deflationary economy. You shouldn't set up your economy in a way that so very strongly discourages any luxury spending... It's bad for your monetary velocity. If no one's buying anything at all because hey, in two years BTC will be a million bucks per, discretionary spending should drop to near zero. New paperback? Not for 200 bucks, no way.

You really, really don't want discretionary spending to dry up, or cease altogether. That'd be "bad."

If that isn't the case -- if someone has done away with the fundamental problem of a deflationary-by-design model, I'm all ears. I haven't come across anything other than hand-wavey bull.

The point about deflationary assets is a good one, but given the power of compounding, that's true of anything you buy when you could have invested the money itself. Young Warren Buffett was apparently famous in his family for saying things like, "Do I want to pay $300,000 for this haircut?"

I don't want this to be construed as being a bitcoin bull, I'm not, but neither am I a complete skeptic. So many bulls and bears seem to think in totality, that bitcoin is either going to take over the world or go to zero, that there is no middle ground or room for bitcoin (or something like it) to serve a purpose somewhere in the middle.

rn mentioned one of these reasons above, which is what if you live somewhere you can't trust the central authority. That's not a small number of people, depending on your definitions, something like half to 2/3rds of the world live under authoritarian regimes. In general, I think there is demand for being able to move semi-large funds around the globe in a way that can't easily be stopped by authorities. Some of these are for nefarious purposes, but others might be to get support to persecuted minorities where other methods are blocked.

Even something like the fragmented state of the cannabis market in the U.S., where even where it is legal, growers and dispensers have difficulty accessing the financial services available to most other businesses, should give pause to thinking that there are no uses for a decentralized currency in the developed world.

F off... it takes about 100 years for 20$ to become 300k at 10% annual compounding interest.

And that's without accounting for inflation, against inflation you can probably get at most 5% and that requires 200 years beating inflation at 5% which is better than the market in the last 50 years.

Notice that bitcoin already achieved this according to the pizza tracker https://bitcoinpizzaindex.net/ and that's just a decade. Current bitcoin prices mean the coin is broken beyond redemption, and worse, energy waste correlates directly with the price until the next halving in 2024, so quite a few years of eco-waste ahead of us.

The haircut example is the title of a piece on Warren Buffett.

https://www.morningstar.com/news/dow-jo ... 00-haircut

So blame him, or the reporter, or the faulty memories of his family and friends. The point wasn't supposed to be about amounts anyway, just that this basic idea that no one would buy anything they don't have to, because the asset will be worth more in the future. That's a problem we already have, but it's mitigated quite a bit by the fact that most people prefer to consume today rather than 100 years in the future.

Yes, bitcoin has appreciated by orders of magnitude more over the last decade than whatever a normal, diversified portfolio has done. No one expects that to go on forever though, rates of growth inevitably have to slow down. The deflationary aspect that people talk about is the fact that eventually, no more coins will be mined, and that the supply will eventually shrink as coins are lost. As long as bitcoin sits alongside other currencies and the world doesn't move to a "bitcoin standard" though, that doesn't seem like much of a problem.

Were the growth of BTC to slow.. Then what? It costs ~25 bucks per transaction. So, it's useful for... Transferring large amounts of money off-shore? That can't go through otherwise-normal banking channels (though, admittedly, I never wired Carlos the money for that 747 of Peruvian flake back in the 80s, so I'm unfamiliar with the going rates for a.. Wells Fargo to ... Bank of Peru transaction. 25 bucks seems pretty decent if I'm transferring 300k across the border. Just not a "typical use case" if you catch my drift.

The problem isn't that BTC won't go to a million, it's that it will and you've spent 140 million bucks on two pizzas.

I know some techbros that pretty religiously don't do discretionary incomes, putting it all away for retirement. That seems unworkable at scale.

 

[Ten Wind]

This is my 1st post here (long time lurker here) and I will probably be downvoted into oblivion. But I am surprised how many here know little about Crypto and that "its largely pointless" is the common perception. Specially when Proof-of-stake systems don't have the negatives of Bitcoin.

Honest question, how many here own (or have owned) Crypto that are calling it "useless"? Be honest! I have a difficult time accepting a regular Ars reader has never owned some.

I think you miss the point. Cryptocurrency, as a concept, is an utter waste of time. Proof of Work coins are a disaster to the environment, and proof of stake coins will never *truly* take off, because the powers that be in the PoW space will simply fork off and continue mining. You can't discount inertia.

I'm sure many an Arsian have owned Arscoin as a joke, including myself, back when that was a thing. Does that now make my opinion more valid, in your eyes?

In all fairness, cryptocurrecy computations are thermodynamically irreversible, so they do materially increase entropy and hasten the inevitable heat death of the universe.

That's something at least.

 

[HexRei]

This is my 1st post here (long time lurker here) and I will probably be downvoted into oblivion. But I am surprised how many here know little about Crypto and that "its largely pointless" is the common perception. Specially when Proof-of-stake systems don't have the negatives of Bitcoin.

Honest question, how many here own (or have owned) Crypto that are calling it "useless"? Be honest! I have a difficult time accepting a regular Ars reader has never owned some.

I think you miss the point. Cryptocurrency, as a concept, is an utter waste of time. Proof of Work coins are a disaster to the environment, and proof of stake coins will never *truly* take off, because the powers that be in the PoW space will simply fork off and continue mining. You can't discount inertia.

I'm sure many an Arsian have owned Arscoin as a joke, including myself, back when that was a thing. Does that now make my opinion more valid, in your eyes?

In all fairness, cryptocurrecy computations are thermodynamically irreversible, so they do materially increase entropy and hasten the inevitable heat death of the universe.

That's something at least.

That has to be the darkest take I have ever seen on an assessment of math, ever.

 

[Rick Rumble]

Right, clearly there's ulterior motives going on here, but:

1) Cryptocurrency is downright terrible to the environment (even the "not as bad as Bitcoin" one's still waste energy)

2) It's a haven for criminal activity (good ol "pay this bitcoin address or your critical infrastructure gets wiped, yay...)

3) It's making it impossible to make a decent PC for a good price.

And I'd really like to make a decent new PC, dang it all. Whoever figured out "hey, I can use video cards to mine this stuff" needs to step on a rake or something, jerk.

Buuuuutttt, I'm willing to bet this train's already left its station, there's probably no stopping it anymore.

 

[unconcerned]

"Officials seem to be worried that ordinary Indian consumers could make bad cryptocurrency bets and lose their savings as a result. "

Oh horseshit. They just can't figure out how to get their cut. I don't have a dog in the fight either way but there's basically zero chance that caring about the wellbeing of others is a major factor here.

This is more about maintaining control of the state to print infinite amounts of their own currency as they see fit. Those with first access to money get richer while the working class get poorer.

Very few states not named the United States can get away with printing infinite amount of money.

Indeed, in a way it is remarkable that even the U.S. can get away with it because the Fed is basically printing money in order to prevent inflation from getting too low, and failing.

And they cannot do it. There is a very plausible theory of "technosponge" absorbing liquidity which requires more printing

 

[arjycharjy89]

"Officials seem to be worried that ordinary Indian consumers could make bad cryptocurrency bets and lose their savings as a result. "

Oh horseshit. They just can't figure out how to get their cut. I don't have a dog in the fight either way but there's basically zero chance that caring about the wellbeing of others is a major factor here.

Thank you. Someone on this forum has a shred of sanity.

 

[RodneyWS1977]

For anyone in the pro cryptocurrency crowd, what is the end-game here? It's becoming more and more energy intensive to make one of these things, right?

 

[PopeBenedict]

They've been banning cryptocurrencies about once every 3 months for years, I think it will be fine.

 

[Inaksa]

Good thing, for the wrong reason, but living in a 3rd world country with record inflation (only surpassed by Venezuela?) I may understand why people would have their savings in another currency that is not local.

Given that, I still think that mining should be banned... either you provide something of value to the society or your electricty is cut. But people says I am an extremist.

I wonder if the timing of this announcement has anything to do with BTC dropping 5 thousand dollars overnight.

nah that is par for the course... BTC has never been "stable" and it's progression is not monotonous ascending/descending, and given the volatility involved in it's trading changing 10k in a day is not surprising.

".. record inflation (only surpassed by Venezuela? .." -- what have you been smoking? There's this thing called "Google search" where you can query for information, try it sometime.

Good thing, for the wrong reason, but living in a 3rd world country with record inflation (only surpassed by Venezuela?) I may understand why people would have their savings in another currency that is not local.

Given that, I still think that mining should be banned... either you provide something of value to the society or your electricty is cut. But people says I am an extremist.

The irony is that with your philosophy, we might as well cut your electricity to save the world. Who actually gains from hearing your opinion, in a provable sense?

Instead of attacking readers, you should be picking a course on reading comprehension... With the inflation I am referring to MY country (which is not India)

 

[Hapticz]

errr, that's the plan?

But if you ban the cryptocurrency it means only the criminals will have cryptocurrency!

I find that offensive. The so-called "criminals" are really the true giants of our society. Slowly they will disappear and communists and unproductive bureaucrats will take their places. Eventually we'll find out the economy will crash without the power of cryptocurrency.

Then the governments of the world will attempt to take over everyone's money in the bank, and finally Satoshi Nakamoto emerges out of a ranch in Colorado to tell us that we need to fight against the corrupt centralized government-led monetary system.

People listen. The governments officials go mad. Biden offers Nakamoto the combined chair of the Federal Reserve/IMF/WorldBank. But Nakamoto - surrounded by fighter drones and robot waifus all made possible by bitcoin - simply says "no". A short pandemonium briefly follows but bitcoins and other cryptos make a quick work of the recovery afterward.

Dollars become useless. But the internet is kept alive by our heroes and cryptos persist. Cold wallets have become the norm and everything is tracked and kept organized by distributed ledgers. The humanity sees a level of productivity never thought to be possible.

So yeah, let's not ban crypto.

 

[Hapticz]

the sooner the better.....

This is my 1st post here (long time lurker here) and I will probably be downvoted into oblivion. But I am surprised how many here know little about Crypto and that "its largely pointless" is the common perception. Specially when Proof-of-stake systems don't have the negatives of Bitcoin.

Honest question, how many here own (or have owned) Crypto that are calling it "useless"? Be honest! I have a difficult time accepting a regular Ars reader has never owned some.

I think you miss the point. Cryptocurrency, as a concept, is an utter waste of time. Proof of Work coins are a disaster to the environment, and proof of stake coins will never *truly* take off, because the powers that be in the PoW space will simply fork off and continue mining. You can't discount inertia.

I'm sure many an Arsian have owned Arscoin as a joke, including myself, back when that was a thing. Does that now make my opinion more valid, in your eyes?

In all fairness, cryptocurrecy computations are thermodynamically irreversible, so they do materially increase entropy and hasten the inevitable heat death of the universe.

That's something at least.

 

[arstrig]

I think I speak for all of us when I say,

GIVE US BACK OUR DARNED VIDEO CARDS!!!!!

 

[koblongata]

If you look closely India isn't really a free country with democracy.