[carleverett]

> I do think that cryptocurrency is nonsense and should be banned

A good definition for "real" cryptocurrency is whether or not it's possible for it to be banned.

[forgetfreeman]

We pretending miners and exchanges can't be legislated out of existence at a scale that would render use of said coin virtually impossible? Edit: Apparently someone is, in fact, pretending just that. Nifty.

[hnarn]

> We pretending miners and exchanges can't be legislated out of existence

Yes? I am assuming you are either not very technical, or do not know a lot about how cryptocurrencies work.

Disclaimer: I am not a proponent of cryptocurrency, I don't own any cryptocurrency, and I am only arguing the technical issue.

If you're talking about banning the hardware, it's probably possible to essentially stop the production and sale of ASIC miners since they have no other purpose, but that's only one type of hardware. People would still be able to use regular CPUs and GPUs to mine.

If you're talking about completely banning the participation in a blockchain, this would be impossible to detect as long as the traffic is encrypted -- if you constantly look for IP addresses and keep a blocklist up to date, you could essentially null-route them (breaking DNS is not enough).

If you do all of the above, which is a lot of work and already completely untenable to sort out on an international level, you still haven't solved the issue of darknets, like Tor or any similar solution.

Take the Silk Road for example, probably one of the most famous darkweb marketplaces for illicit drugs ever. We can only guess how much money and time the FBI spent building a case, and even when they managed to find him by bending every opsec weakness they could find, they still had to ambush him in a library and catch him with his laptop unlocked.

My point here is that nobody claims darknets will protect you completely, but it raises the bar immensely for the amount of necessary work to catch you. If blockchains (currencies) were made illegal globally, it's a pretty safe bet this would accelerate technology for doing the exact same things as before, just in an anonymized fashion.

Then what? Do you illegalize writing code that facilitates cryptocurrency? Illegalize darknets?

Just saying "make it illegal" is naive. It chooses to ignore the massive violations of our rights that would have to be made to not even succeed, but create the appearance of succeeding.

If you have a concrete proposal on how it would be technically possible to ban miners and exchanges, without also banning encryption and anonymity online, I'm listening.