It's precisely when people feel this way about things that large chunks of our civil liberties are forfeit.
Precedents: the war on drugs, crusades against porn, alcohol prohibition, the war on terror, mandatory minimum sentencing, etc.
It's a lynch mob mentality writ large and allows reckless legislators and police to gallop right over all kinds of civil boundaries that very much exist for a reason.
A much narrower set of solutions could address your concerns: a tax on proof of work mining, a ban on the sale of hardware whose sole purpose is cryptocurrency mining, or a ban on domestic exchanges converting money to/from cryptocurrencies that use high-resource proof of work mechanisms.
I see no reason to ban proof of stake or other consensus mechanism cryptocurrencies, and stepping up enforcement of existing KYC/AML regulations would help fight money laundering.
I also must point out that real estate, sham art auctions, sham investments and businesses, and numerous other mechanisms collectively account for the vast bulk of all money laundering. Cryptocurrency is a niche player. It's also a niche player in the street drug market where the vast majority of transactions use physical cash.
As far as bubbles and speculative manias go... it's legal for an adult to buy a lotto ticket (that is run by the state!) or go to a casino (permitted and regulated by the state). This is no worse. I might support raising taxes on short term speculative sorts of financial games, but those would also need to be applied to high frequency trading and speculative games run by hedge funds in conventional markets. Those are much larger than anything in crypto.
I say all this as a mostly cryptocurrency skeptic.
You can’t compare bitcoin to porn, gambling, drugs and alcohol. Bitcoin is the only one that doesn’t affect dopamine levels in the brain, and that virtually no one would seek out if it was suddenly illegal.
Precedents: the war on drugs, crusades against porn, alcohol prohibition, the war on terror, mandatory minimum sentencing, etc.
It's a lynch mob mentality writ large and allows reckless legislators and police to gallop right over all kinds of civil boundaries that very much exist for a reason.
A much narrower set of solutions could address your concerns: a tax on proof of work mining, a ban on the sale of hardware whose sole purpose is cryptocurrency mining, or a ban on domestic exchanges converting money to/from cryptocurrencies that use high-resource proof of work mechanisms.
I see no reason to ban proof of stake or other consensus mechanism cryptocurrencies, and stepping up enforcement of existing KYC/AML regulations would help fight money laundering.
I also must point out that real estate, sham art auctions, sham investments and businesses, and numerous other mechanisms collectively account for the vast bulk of all money laundering. Cryptocurrency is a niche player. It's also a niche player in the street drug market where the vast majority of transactions use physical cash.
As far as bubbles and speculative manias go... it's legal for an adult to buy a lotto ticket (that is run by the state!) or go to a casino (permitted and regulated by the state). This is no worse. I might support raising taxes on short term speculative sorts of financial games, but those would also need to be applied to high frequency trading and speculative games run by hedge funds in conventional markets. Those are much larger than anything in crypto.
I say all this as a mostly cryptocurrency skeptic.