But seriously, I'm not sure which is worse: Watching your stolen money move around the blockchain knowing you are helpless to do anything about it, or being provably unable to even tell the difference between "real" and "counterfeit" coins.
Well, not much different from what our banks do.
The only place regulatory enforcement could hit Bitcoin is at the fiat exchanges, which are already beholden to KYC/AML.
> social stigmatization
People have already tried that; "Bitcoin is only for illegal drugs and guns!" Didn't work.
Unlike HYIP, which are a malicious scam, and LR, which essentially only existed for money laundering and had a single point of failure, bitcoin is at least some kind of innovation.
This position isn't really better than the knee-jerk "bitcoin will replace the Federal Reserve". Both are based on feelings or ideology rather than research, and both fail to acknowledge the great uncertainty that clearly surrounds the future of bitcoin and blockchain technology.
You don't understand economy.
So here we have a bunch crypto-anarchists with their usual "fiat is fiction"-spiel. Let me ask you to put your worthless paper money[0] where your mind is: I have drawn this wonderful $1 note, and will add as many zeros as you wish, giving you a 10-for-1 payout for useless US treasury fiat.
oh well. At least every time one of these great new ponzi schemes finds a new way for provable-secure technology to be insecure, we can enjoy the knowledge that another $100mill is in the hands of a more worthy owner.
[0] most of it isn't even paper, but apparently paper is a better symbol for evanescence than "electric charge" or "a linen/cotton-blend"
The large scale, society-level abstractions and shared fictions, such as money, are a whole different beast.
It's just that some people stopped running around wide-eyed telling others about this revelation a few days later.
I guess we did get lucky in that the object of obsession they chose wasn't the law. Please don't tell them that murder is only a crime because enough people believe it to be or they'll throw us all in blockchains.
Sure, on the surface this is easy to understand. But what might it look like for such a process to unfold? How do the fundamental dynamics and primary characteristics of a money system change over time, and why?
Honestly, I can't really answer those questions in any kind of sophisticated way. A lot of discussions involving the Fed and broad macroeconomic policies feel fairly hand-wavy to me.
Sure, the basics of runaway inflation caused by reckless money printing is not too hard to understand. But that's just one of many scenarios.