I was mostly ambivalent about crypto - it seemed like a lot of speculation but I liked some scenarios it enabled (mostly scenarios where traditional payment was not practical for w/e reason).
But seeing the HW situation, energy burn, scammers, infra hijacking, etc. there are so many negatives I'm more and more in favour of making it illegal.
This is a clear case of market incentives getting corrupted and not actually providing any utility. At this point it's not about whether you believe crypto will succeed at any of it's proposed utilities, people are investing because they want to get in on the hype bubble and ride high. And once you're in you have every incentive to prothletise before you cash out.
Meanwhile the rest of us get stuck with externalities - huge energy consumption, hardware supply disruptions, hardware waste, compute hijacking, enabling scammers and extortions schemes.
I don't think crypto should be illegal but the institutions enabling it should
You should read about Accelerationism. You have a left-wing interpretation of Accelerationism (we should create new laws to handle technological divergences) and I have a right-wing interpretation of Accelerationism (as systems becomes more fragile from cryptocurrencies, such as in this example, corporations will be motivated to find cheaper ways to produce electricity, GPUs. Thus I believe that because of increased chaos, "Corporations find a way").
I always thought right wingers where interested in the Sovereignty of the Individual but you are explicitly and consciously pro-corporations? Seems likely to have some bad local maxima without regulation from the Individuals speaking thru a Democratic Government.
I am pro autonomous corporations. I want Manna[0] in reverse so that instead of making fast-food employees listen to an AI, I want to start at the top.
I think some debate on the political level is very much necessary. From the way use it to the way we manufacture crypto. At the moment it’s not just sustainable (think environment, think speculation and so on)
Crypto / blockchain is great, its current implementation is very much lacking.
It's illegal already to dump toxic waste in your neighbors pond. And just bitcoin does something way WAY worse than this.
I realize what I'm asking for. I'm asking for cryptocurrency speculators to actually pay for the externalities they cause.
Because that's the core of the libertarianism they pretend to support. But of course they don't have libertarian values. The only ideal they stand for is them getting richer by burning everyone else to the ground.
Electricity usage has major externalities which are not taxed because people would get pissed off. If every country instituted carbon taxes I'd be much more accepting of crypto/proof of work, but we're nowhere close to that happening.
The topic at hand should already be illegal, no? You don't need a cryptocurrency-specific law to cover running code on someone's server without permission.
Something like a very hefty tax for fiat/crypto exchanges would probably already solve the whole problem if a ban is the end goal.
People would still be able to use it freely for the applications crypto enthusiasts claim it is meant for (like using it as a decentralized currency for payment).
But in reality the hype (and with that, its value) would probably crash because it would not longer be as attractive for the money gambling it is actually used for.
Just a thought, I'm probably overlooking something.
No, but it lets you punish people that do them. No one is under the assumption that outlawing something means that it will never happen, and implying that people breaking the law means that the law is useless is asinine.
If we believed laws had zero effect on behavior, society would be a lot different.
Illegal is the appropriate word when you're looking at something that's draining resources (electrical and human) in every major country and providing nothing of value in return. (I've made some nice money from crypto speculating, but that's not making the world better, that's just taking advantage of bigger fools.)
Proof of work systems, which by design compete on wasting resources, need to internationally outlawed.
If people want cryptocurrencies to keep going, they can get a move on finally fucking migrating to these alternatives systems they tell us are just around the corner. If none of the major networks are able to do so, they shouldn't exist.
If there is a regulatory route towards reducing / eliminating crypto, I would hope that involves restrictions on the fiat / crypto interchange, not restrictions on what kind of math you can do with a computer.
We have rules against speculation because it highly skews towards people already with the necessary resources. 2008 is already a distant memory for some.
Math will never be outlawed, but as it stands now it is just too speculative. I don’t have an answer, but as it stands [cryptocurrency / NFT] we need to have a lively debate on what we want it to be.
This is so broad I am not sure which laws you reference. Most of the laws I am aware of talk about how bmuch money you must have to be allowed to speculate.
> Math will never be outlawed,
I wish I shared you certainty. We currently have laws about exporting some types of Math (cryptography) and we have lots politicians interested in placing further restrictions on cryptography.
Countries around the world implemented laws : Dodd-Frank in the US. Banks have tighter rules against speculative activities in general around the world after 2008. It was a mortgage crisis foremost, with lots of speculation. Crypto is kind of the same : you invest and hope to gain a return. It stands to reason you want to curb the damage it can do if (and when) it bombs.
Laws in general should not be unnecessary broad, most countries have that general rule, and while there is certainly another debate to had on privacy and backdoors, it is a different debate. So when a law comes against Crypto, it should be very specific to curb its problems.
We have already "outlawed" physics, chemistry and biology (various crimes involve these) and even communication (fraud and slander). Might as well "outlaw math" as well.
Thing is crypto already has huge negative impacts and I'm yet to see any utility that would even remotely compare. It seems like the ultimate buble hype market for people to speculate on and sell bullshit stories.
I have seen no proof that it solves anything the proponents have been touting for 5+ years now - just examples of increases in negative externalities.
Reposting my comment from another thread about DeFi. There's clear innovation and utility in that space and it would be a shame to kill it all over the worst crypto has to offer.
"There are financial primitives that cannot exist in traditional finance that I'd call pretty novel. For example flash loans allow uncollateralized loans for millions of dollars[0]. Or take KeeperDAO[1] or Dai[2] or any of the other meta protocols generating returns by providing utility. Also the sheer fact that this is all decentralized/identity-less is already a novel aspect.
Read into it- it's not as scary as it sounds and it allows for more efficient aribtrage meaning tighter markets across services. The whole transaction is atomic meaning no risk for the lenders (lump sum must be paid back in a single transaction + small interest fee).
Flash loans are only executed if the entire transaction is valid monetarily. A transaction on Ethereum is like a database, if there are any issues it's rolled back.
It’s the easiest and 2nd most secure way to pay for Mullvad VPN (also used as the backend of the Mozilla VPN). The only other alternative that leaves them with nothing to log is sending cash in an envelope.
Donations to people where paypal doesn’t work are also easier.
Those are the only uses cases (for me) I encountered and used though ;)
Can't get a log that has been wiped. But yes, Mullvad are only as good as their word. The other more expensive and complicated alternative would be to host your own vpn server, which still has the server provider as the trust anchor.
Tor is the only network sufficient enough to thwart malicious state actor's efforts.
Rumor no more [0]
No sane person should want the state marking them an enemy. Playing that game quickly becomes a contest of who'll be the first to blink. And you will in the end, blink.
It seems fairly obvious once you trace the funding on a lot of nodes. Plus that court case that got dropped with the child porn guy - they dropped it because they refused to show how they found him. 0day most likely.
It's certainly a nice tool if your country is falling apart. Nearly every other asset class is less accessible, transportable or secure against seizure than Bitcoin.
When countries descend into chaos or go full on authoritarian the best option is often to leave, but there might already be capital controls. So what can you take with you? Stocks: good luck if held by a broker in the country. Physical gold or cash: good luck at the border/customs. Foreign accounts: hard to come by for most people even in the first world due to regulations. Any serious amount of money is very hard to move between jurisdictions, especially in times of crisis, through traditional means.
If you believe your host country doesn't own you and you should be able to relocate to wherever you are treated best, Bitcoin can be a good tool if you were unprepared so far (e.g. because you didn't think a crisis could hit _your_ country). This might not be a use case for you today, especially if you are happy with your country and it is stable. But don't discount that the situation of others might differ.
That only really works for stable countries anyway. While shit is hitting the fan there will be enough incentive not to care about some silly rule as long as breaking it is not easily detectable. In the worst case trading moves from centralized exchanges to decentralized OTC trades. I don't think any government can really stop Bitcoin at this point.
If that's your critic then Proof-of-Work is the issue, not crypto currencies in general. There are multiple Proof-of-Stake implementations already in production (still very young though), each with its set of properties (see Cardano, Algorand, Tezos, Polkadot, Harmony, etc).
It took me a while to find out the description of this proof of space-time (and check whether it's satire or not), so to save you time here's the gist of it:
From the whitepaper:
Loosely speaking, the PoST consists of two phases: an initialization phase (executed once), in which miners “commit” to the data that fills the space S , and an execution phase (executed repeatedly), in which miners prove that they are still storing the data. The time component of the spacetime resource is the elapsed time between successive proofs—if the interval between initialization (or the previous execution phase) and the latest execution phase is T, this proves the miner expended S · T spacetime.
> We provide an initial security analysis of the Chia backbone, showing that as long as at least ≈ 61.5% of the space is controlled by honest parties Chia satisfies basic blockchain security properties.
That seems to be a alarming high threshold for control of the network? So as little as 38.6% can attack the network?
I think it will provide horrible incentives to demand ever greater storage space, driving up the costs of storage in the same way that PoW coins have driven up the cost of graphics cards. It's also likely to have pretty bad environmental externalities as manufacturing said storage will have both energy and material waste side-effects.
Proof of space is just as poor an idea as PoW, because if it takes off it will drive up demand and prices for hard drives, creating the same incentives around them as there is currently around GPUs.
The whole idea of creating artificial digital scarcity by basing it on physical scarcity of resources is just horrible.
Hardly. It's not about scarcity for PoS+T. The pollution, heat, and energy waste of Proof of Work far outweigh and minimal change in the cost of storage that PoS+T might bring.
Of course it’s about scarcity. If it’s profitable to dedicate storage to this scheme, it will stoke demand for that storage, the only limit of which is breakeven on the costs, scarcity and availability of that storage is then the factor limiting the space. And the whole scheme, as with all cryptocurrency, is designed to create digital scarcity in a decentralised way.
It’s a terrible plan and very shortsighted. Making hard drives isn’t free of environmental externalities.
Again, I fail to understand that math or extremist rationale. You're comparing existing significant energy waste to an artificial scenario where all drive space is hoarded - and if that case ever came true, the total energy waste would still remain less than PoW by orders of magnitude.
That's not an artificial scenario, it's the scenario that would happen if proof of space took off, people would have a financial incentive to use storage space.
> if that case ever came true, the total energy waste would still remain less than PoW by orders of magnitude.
Yes less ongoing energy use, but it does reward creation and effective waste of hard drive space, which isn't without environmental knock-on effects, both some energy use and for chemical byproducts etc.
This is not an 'extremist rationale', if you give people a direct financial incentive to get as much storage as possible, what do you think would happen?
That is a very simplistic, and incorrect, response to the problem.
GitHub provides computing resources, for free, to attract users. This is just one of the challenges of that business model. If this is intolerable for GitHub then it's up to them to find a strategy to counter it.
We don't need to ask the government to punish everyone participating in cryptocurrency.
>That is a very simplistic, and incorrect, response to the problem.
Perhaps we should consider higher-order consequences of doing absolutely nothing. Hypothetically, what happens if free-to-use code collaboration tools are forced out of the market due to rampant abuse and zero regulation? Do we care that there is now a higher barrier of entry to engage in the craft?
Do you want GitHub to start requiring state-issued identification for creating new accounts? That is where this cat-mouse game is going to end up if you allow it to continue naturally.
Since the downsides of proof-of-work get worse based on market price, instead of making it illegal, governments could try to crash it. A 10% wealth tax on holding proof-of-work cryptocurrency would encourage people and businesses who don’t cheat on their taxes to sell.
Let's start with universal carbon tax / credit system to start to curb the interplay of crypto with existential planetary threat. Less worried about taxing people with piles of virtual shells more about basic survival and human quality of life.
With credit systems we can have progressive rates i.e food can be a priority while VR and cryto can subsidize carbon neutral transition.
This problem will resolve itself in 5-10 years when people move to proof-of-stake blockchains. There will be no more demand for proof-of-work cryptocurrencies and attacks like this are no longer economically interesting.
The problem is what is illegal then? Numbers? Cryptography? Because nobody buy sell or own crypto technically, there just happen to be transactions on a distributed network, with some people knowing private keys to generate new transactions. It could be possible to regulate exchanges dealing with fiat, but I feel like the regulable surface area is thin. Also I hope Proof of stake take over so that a big part of these issues will be non existent in a few years.
> It could be possible to regulate exchanges dealing with fiat, but I feel like the regulable surface area is thin.
It may be thin, but it covers most people. Most crypto buyers use fiat exchanges. If those were ruled out, the monetary value of tokens would go down, and with it the mining incentives would lower. It wouldn't be the end of crypto, but it would alleviate many issues (energy, hardware shortage, etc).
PS: I don't think crypto is the only reason for GPU shortage (others being more demand from stay-at-home people, and general semiconductor shortages), but I believe it plays a part.
So basically get rid of all the legitimate use cases and leave the nefarious ones? Not everyone lives in the developed world where they can just Venmo their friends for brunch. Some people live in counties with capital controls that means they see their wealth disappear year after year.
Gamers in western countries have to pay slightly higher prices for their high end gaming GPUs. Excuse me while I clutch my pearls!
The cavalier attitude people have about this tech is really disheartening to see.
Can anyone claim with a straight face that the current state of the crypto ecosystem permits use cases like "splitting a bill with your friends after lunch" or "hiding your earnings from unjust taxation"?
It may aspire to be/do these things, and that's great, but that’s not the present reality.
It's the base layer of payment system. There will be a layer on top of it for things like that. When you split a check on venmo, that money isn't really there until a few days. The venmo system is a few layers removed from the equivalent of Bitcoin..
What Bitcoin provides is sound money with a fixed predictable supply not at the whims of politicians and fed officials. There is no way to increase the supply of Bitcoin by 23% like we had with the us dollar over the last year
I would expect "sound money" to have a fairly stable, predictable value in terms of real-world goods and services for which it can be exchanged. I haven't observed that to be the case for Bitcoin.
Being "at the whims of politicians and fed officials" seems in practice to provide much better stability than being at the whims of a horde of reddit "investors" (or a cabal of Chinese miners).
> Being "at the whims of politicians and fed officials" seems in practice to provide much better stability than being at the whims of a horde of reddit "investors" (or a cabal of Chinese miners).
Not to mention almost everyone I know who "invests" in crypto does so "at the whims of politicians and fed officials." SEC rulings and the likes.
If you want a (relatively) untraceable cryptocurrency, they exist [0]. Yes, most cryptocurrencies are _perfectly_ traceable - you can trace the source/destination of every transaction - contrary to the common narrative.
> slightly higher prices for their high end gaming GPUs
This is across the board, not just for high-end cards.
Newegg has a total of one graphics card released in the past 5 years in stock that it sells directly (https://www.newegg.com/p/1DW-001Z-00042), a RX 550 going for $200 (plus $8 shipping) -- the 2GB model launched at a MSRP of $79; I assume the 4GB model's MSRP would be somewhere between that and the $99 MSRP of the RX 560.
The rest of the items for sale are third parties which are often no-name brands/shippers from China (e.g. Yeston which seems to have lackluster reviews about short warranty and sloppy build quality, Corn which has many horror stories about shipping delays or just missing products), and all have similarly drastically hiked prices. Next cheapest card shipped from the US is a 560 at $279+15.
The 550 is by no means a high-end gaming GPU, nor was it when it came out.
No one has a claim on any one product such that they can demand the destruction of something millions of people find value in and that has a market value of a trillion dollars so you can have your GPU return to a price in the past that they found reasonable
You're exaggerating why people dislike cryptocurrency by focusing on a singular reason.
I think the root cause is because it's conflated with bitcoin and the PoW system it's built on top of, which is generally considered to be unproductive. Take away PoW, and you remove the incentives for miners to suck up vast amounts of electricity, the supply of graphics cards, probably even infrastructure hijacks to some point.
(And yes, I understand that the graphic card shortage is more strongly tied to Ethereum's ASIC-resistant hash. But that's still a PoW system.)
Bitcoin and PoW crypto is priced to the global lowest cost of energy. For instance, it would not be economical mine bitcoin in Los Angeles in the middle of the day in August. Most of the mining happens in remote areas in China where there is abundant cheap energy at off-peak times.
So it's not fair to look at pure energy used by the Bitcoin network as though its some fungible limited supply that we can just move away from Bitcoin production and move to Texas during the winter storm.
Regarding carbon emission, that's a political problem. If you want to create a tax on carbon, you can do that, although I'd prefer carbon capture tech. But in no way should some governing body try to allocate the validity of carbon emissions based on purpose. That would be no different than central planning where some central authority determines how many X should be produced, when and where. It's been tried and failed.
But look at the point of PoW and the purpose of crypto. Its sound money and has value, and an expense to maintain. Whats the alternative? Create a currency with a trusted central bank, and build an army to defend your organization when someone uses your currency to "fund terrorism"? I imagine there's CO2 emissions w/ maintaining an army as well
HN has hated crypto for a decade now and it's only recently been about energy consumption. It was and will be about monetary policy and the role of government in issuing currency. Kaynes vs Hayek kind of thing. Which in a way is about authoritarian vs market forces. For some reason Hacker News really likes the idea of centralized authority and criminalizing things like math and free association by threat of violence and imprisonment.
> For some reason Hacker News really likes the idea of centralized authority and criminalizing things like math and free association by threat of violence and imprisonment.
The new kind of "geek" in the opposite of the traditional "geek" who was a libertarian / pro freedom.
My guess is that most geeks can't afford to bite the hand that feeds them (google/facebook/twitter...) so they decided to loudly proclaim their allegiance to modern values (environmentalism/social justice/wokeness in general)
There were leftists among geeks the whole time. Stallman didn’t even want passwords. A lot of people viewed technology as a way to achieve mass human prosperity and end the bullshit accumulation of numbers in a database/blockchain ledger as a proxy for social status/power. The environmentalism and the desire for justice is a genuinely held belief of many scientific oriented people of a humanist bent. The difference between math and computers back then was that computers would let you do math stuff and thereby transform society.
> The environmentalism and the desire for justice is a genuinely held belief of many scientific oriented people of a humanist bent
Is it not interesting in how this is a new social good, especially for geeks working for large corporations in California?
I believe all behavior is based in self preservation: it would be career suicide for a young googler to be part of the christian right, or pro Trump, or try to pull off a Damore like memo.
So I am not surprise they do not bite the hand that feed. I am only surprised in the convoluted rationalization they engage in, instead of being more honest (at least online where they can be anonymous) and say "I pretend I'm woke because I like my job because I like the money and status it gets me"
Oceans razor good sir. And left desire to transform society has if anything decreased in the last fifty years. In the 1970s people with sincere belief said The US is on a journey towards a just and free society. Where we honor e pluribus unum. Where people programmed computers to unleash the potentially awesome society it would enable. What is new is a bunch of smart and powerful individuals settling for a salary while they give their power over to corporations that are structurally unable to stop stealing everones privacy and stop from putting human decency under the next quarters profit.
The reason why so-called Christians are unpopular is because they are seen as public hypocrites; rather than follow Jesus and condemn praying in public, and instead helping the poor, the widows, and the orphans, they seem to spend their energy seemingly endorsing superstitious racialist ideas that were clearly un-Godly 100 years ago.
Those ideas are horrid and they are rejected because they are horrid. Not because Google is pushing an agenda of the sacredness of all human beings, a mirror of the image of God no matter what history they walked to get here.
And the environmental movement is just the same as the people saying “there is a flood coming from the blocked sewer drain, let’s go unblock it.” The anti-environmentalists are the people saying, naw, don’t worry about it.
A second reply. If you sincerely believe all behavior is based on self preservation, perhaps you do not understand that a sincere Christian, seeing each person as good and capable of more good and worth suffering for, can thrive in all sorts of environments, being a angel to others and not being untrue to God and without being a notable asshole. We have songs for training people in how to do this, about Love and the Christ in me greets the Christ in thee and on on.
> Some people live in counties with capital controls that means they see their wealth disappear year after year.
So the purpose of cryptocurrency here is to enable people to evade the laws of the society in which they live? Not sure I can regard that as a "legitimate use case".
Under PoW each of those GPUs consumes significant energy and that's the real issue. It seems like a fairly cavalier attitude to ignore that fact. Maybe PoW will be fine in 200 years when fossil fuels are finally phased out, but likely not in this century.
Memory and SSD chips are made on older processes with coarser structures which means that they're more or less unaffected by the current limitations in manufacturing capacity that CPUs and GPUs suffer.
Because they're harder to build, and there is some serious HPC capacity is being built up right now around the world, which buys these chips buy thousands.
Same entities which hoard Tesla GPUs are not interested in unregistered RAM, consumer SSDs and CPUs. Unfortunately, a run of the mill Tesla is not much different from a GeForce. OTOH, RAM, CPU and SSD for these applications are built from different parts.
> The problem is what is illegal then? Numbers? Cryptography?
What is cash? Paper? Ink? Currency isn't defined by what it's made of.
> there just happen to be transactions on a distributed network, with some people knowing private keys to generate new transactions
Transactions in which digital tokens are exchanged for goods, services, or other currencies, and the recipient of the tokens generally receives no benefit other than the ability to trade those tokens again.
Cryptocurrencies are recognizable by the way they are used.
Like making drugs and alcohol illigal. Declaring something illigal doesn't stop it. It still has value - therefore it will continue on without you, and then only those that deal illigally get the benefits of crypto.
I don't care if people own or trade crypto - exchanges and financial institutions should not be allowed to trade it - there's a reason those institutions are heavily regulated.
As long as the proposed outlawing is along lines of taxation to make legitimate holdings infeasible, rather than establishing some arbitrary # of SHA256 hashes I am legally allowed to compute per unit time.
The SEC has always been in place supposedly to protect the average citizen from being able to make bad investments - however I don't understand how they dropped the ball so hard with crypto-"currencies;" regulatory capture by VC-finance industrial complex?
Is it that they are global and decentralized that made them just not take a stance on them, also the same reason it obviously would easily and quickly gain popularity as a global, decentralized MLM-Ponzi structure?
ML requires a useful corpus of data to train on. I don’t see how the energy abuse of crypto mining is remotely replicable with ML. For me, this has nothing to do with having a “neo-Luddite stance”
Training a decently large ML model requires a huge amount of compute power. There exists specialized hardware for these purposes (e.g. TPUs, FPGAs, bespoke ASICs or even the giant wafer-sized chips from Cerebras).
Besides, even after training, inference can also require huge amounts of computing power, with data requirements only a fraction of those during training.
The energy usage of ML is astonishingly high, even at inference time. Getting it down to the energy efficiency of human brains is a major area of research, sort of like proof of stake.
The parallels between the two domains are very strong for those who are well-versed in them, but some people seem to pick one or the other as "too dangerous to keep around" for some reason, which is literally the Luddite stance.
"The Luddites were an early 19th century radical group which destroyed textile machinery as a form of protest. The group was protesting against the use of machinery in a "fraudulent and deceitful manner" to get around standard labour practices."
That's not "because they thought textile machinery was too dangerous to keep around" or "because they hate technology".
I fail to see the problem here. There are legitimate (often different) concerns about both of these two technologies.
The term "luddite" is often used to dismiss legitimate concerns about the negative impacts of a technology by those with no interest in addressing their impacts. If you find yourself using that term, you should go back a reassess your writing.
I am all in favor of discussing the problems with both sets of technologies. I personally think both have the potential to move humanity forward, or to be destructive.
I think "downsides exist therefore we must ban" as OP expressed is not a reasonable position. I'd consider it a neo-Luddite stance, but if that word is too strong or has the wrong connotations, then maybe "anti-progress" or tech-restrictionist or something.
Regardless, I still have yet to see why anyone wanting to ban crypto for the states reasons would not accept the same arguments w/r/t ML.
The only reason I assume we haven't seen the same vulnerability exploited for ML is that making decent model architectures is beyond the reach of most script kiddie types.
You haven't made any argument for similarity besides "they both consume computing resources to produce something of value.”
The legitimate concerns about ML (bias, privacy loss, etc) are very different from those about crypto (energy usage, enables a signifant amount of online crime, speculation)
i see crypto currencies as the only decentralized entity to act as a counterweight to the big corporations that make a living from tracking and snooping.
monero is very anonymous; also with bitcoin i read the term "pseydonymous" - they still have to make a non trivial effort to link an address to your real identity, it is still harder than to identify you by your phone number, gmail account/apple id and credit card transactions. (even harder if you generate a new bitcoin address per transaction)
It needs to be regulated, that’s a fact. Governments are behind the ball on regulating the mining of it. The environmental damage of unbounded mining is offsetting much of climate change progress.
I'm really curious as to Who is upvoting this take.
Making something illegal won't stop it from happening. Just because tech can be used for bad purposes doesn't mean you have to or will have any effectiveness in banning it. See encryption.
It's such a lazy take, ignores the freedom aspect and goes for convenience and feels like a concern troll, honestly.
I think the upvotes are more in the spirit of "I share your frustration and negative outlook of crypto in general" rather than an endorsement of the specific policy suggestion.
While I agree that making something illegal won't stop it from happening - in this case, banning a currency drastically curtails the functionality of it. That reduces the value of it, which in turn would reduce demand and supply.
"Making something illegal won't stop it from happening"
But in the case of cryptocurrency, putting impediments in the way of exchanging it back and forwards with 'fiat' would significantly impact its appeal and demand. Could they stop it entirely? Probably not. Would it stop most people who only care about the easy profit potential and don't care about the idealogy? Probably.
But seeing the HW situation, energy burn, scammers, infra hijacking, etc. there are so many negatives I'm more and more in favour of making it illegal.