What if they had simply used the open source FPGA designs for the first version of their ASICs?

Huh? If everybody were using Bitcoin right now, then everybody would be subject to the same inflation rate too.

If by that you mean adopting the euro, then yes, that was an improvement over what came before. Using something like BTC would have been a much greater improvement, but having a single fiat currency was still an improvement over having many little fiefdoms. And tying the parachutes together is not a good analogy. Printing money is a bad idea, and printing money unilaterally is the only thing the national governments gave up. Cyprus could not have saved itself by printing money. The Cypriots could easily have implemented good banking oversight had they wanted to. Preferably by leaving it to the market, but even if the government did it and had done a decent job. This by itself would have prevented the problem, regardless of what the ECB did.

More loudly now than if they hadn't handled it badly. But as I said, I do accept democracy as the lesser evil, and the least bad viable form of government. Maybe in the future other forms with more respect for property rights and individual liberties will become viable. I certainly hope so.


Through no mechanism at all because the mechanisms that caused this were implemented by national governments long before there ever was an EU. Mandatory deposit insurance, defective government oversight instead of strict market discipline, legal tender laws, fiat currencies, politically motivated accounting rules instead of market discipline and so on, and so on.

That's a good point, but I don't think that's how it works under a deposit insurance scheme. There the state gets all assets first and only then bails out depositors to a limit of E100k. I think deposit insurance is a bad idea, and if you didn't have it, then you'd get the normal bankruptcy process, which works as you described except for the actual deposit insurance at the end. If that procedure had been followed, then small depositors would have received less, and large depositors might have received more. But that's probably not what the law said under the deposit insurance scheme.

Theoretically no, just like most of the things governments do seem to me to be usurpation of citizens' freedoms, but pragmatically, yes.


What makes you even suspect that could be the case? Through what mechanism did the EU cause the Cypriot government to be delinquent in its supervisory duties?

Because I don't think the bail-out was handled well. And I'm also complaining that people are falsely accusing the EU of taking Cypriots' money, when in fact they were taking EU taxpayers' money.


They didn't demand the deposits be forfeited, they simply refused to put any money into the banks they never guaranteed in the first place. If the Cypriot government had been solvent, had exercised proper oversight, or had been prudent enough not to guarantee deposits in untrustworthy banks, then it would have been able to uphold its obligations. It was their insolvency that caused them to do what they did, not the EU. Without the EU, the mess would have been even greater for the Cypriots.

I reluctantly agree with some sort of bailout, even though I don't think it was handled well.


They're still being blamed for things they didn't do, instead of things they did do.

I don't know who came up with it, but the fact is that without outside help the Cypriot government would have been unable to uphold its obligations. And help can come with strings attached.

Also, on reflection, I'm not so sure that the deposit insurance scheme would have made much of a difference to large depositors. I suspect that under Cypriot law the Cypriot government would have been on the hook for safeguarding the deposits below E100k and if there weren't enough assets left in the banks to cover those, all assets would go to the Cypriot government, and not a penny to depositors for their holdings above the E100k limit.

So then the question is whether there was more money in the banks than necessary to honour at least the deposits up to a limit of E100k. I don't know, but I suspect there wasn't.

Because it's my money the EC is taking, not the Cypriots' money.

No, but I am an EU taxpayer.

Yeah. I suspect that's because some people fear it will thwart their own plans to strike it rich with BTC they amassed back when mining was still easy. I'm not so sure the competition with XRP will in fact outweigh the synergy from the Ripple exchange system, but perhaps they are. Personally, I think the odds of at least one of the two currencies, and quite possibly both, being successful will be greatly improved by the advent of the Ripple trading system.

Sure, but the EU didn't prevent them from doing that, this was their own fault. Or to be more precise, they were stupid / corrupt enough to guarantee the deposits of untrustworthy banks and then unable to uphold their obligations when the shit hit the fan. This was a crisis all of their own making, and I resent being blamed by a bunch of ingrates when we're actually helping the fuckers get their act together.

What do you mean 'forced'? The fact that they were insolvent meant that they couldn't honour their obligations under the Cypriot deposit insurance scheme. The EU didn't force them, their lack of money did.

Perhaps, but it could still be an excellent distributed BTC exchange and trust-based payment system.

That may be true, but also note that the Cypriot government would have been unable to uphold its obligations under its deposit insurance laws. A state default would have been a better outcome and then more assets would have had to be sold off. The fact that this wasn't done does indeed harm large depositors. Instead of the Cypriot government selling off all its assets, the EU pitched in. So if there was any theft, it was theft by the Cypriot government from large depositors and a theft of EU taxpayers' money by the other member states, not theft of Cypriot money by the EU.


As opposed to being backed by an insolvent government...

Well, I'd say it's a good reason not to hold large amounts of XRP or IOUs for now, not an argument against using Ripple as an exchange between BTC and fiat currencies, or as a mechanism to make fiat payments through your trust network.

The national governments of the EU member states.

The shareholders lost everything, as they should have. Many bank personnel, including managers are losing their jobs, just as they should have in a bank failure. Everybody who had a balance below E100k got their money back, as they should have, at least while the deposit insurance was the law of the land. Everybody who had a balance of over E100k lost most of the amount above that limit, as they should have.

Yes, many depositors were shafted, but they were shafted by the banks and the Cypriot government which encouraged them to gamble with other people's money. And this problem was not only not caused by the EU, it is present far beyond the EU. The real culprits are fiat currencies and fractional reserve banking. That is what we should be fighting.

But they didn't steal the Cypriots' money, which is what they were accused of in this thread, they devalued euro holdings and stole EU taxpayers' money.