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Comment by gggdvnkhmbgjvbn | Hacker News Reader

All comments so far have been pro-bitcoin... does nobody think this could actually be a sensible decision?

If you follow Bitcoin politics you'd know that there is a large population of Bitcoin users who like this decision[0][3][4].

There is an upcoming contentious hard fork in Bitcoin called Segwit2x. It activates in November and is supported by some miners and a number of Bitcoin companies. Those who oppose that hard fork believe cutting China out of the network will cause the proposal to fail.

Segwit2x was a compromise between Bitcoin providers and the very miners that China look like shutting down now - primarily Bitmain, who many believe are also behind, or in control of, the previous bcash bitcoin fork. The compromise was activating Segwit in exchange for miners getting their wish of a 2MB block size increase. Segwit has since been force-activated with a user-activated soft fork - so many feel the compromise is now not necessary and presents many risks.

[0] https://twitter.com/stefanobernardi/status/91023339225132646...

[1] https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/01/26/segwit-benefits/

[2] https://github.com/OPUASF/UASF

Here you go: Have you ever heard of capital flight from Russia? Oligarchs sell oil then then purchase houses in London or Manhattan. The country is gradually hollowed out. China, OTOH, is trying to keep the money at home.

China might have an easier time discouraging capital flight if it weren't the sort of place where entrepreneurs have to worry about their entire industries becoming illegal and possibly finding themselves in jail overnight.

All 2 comments? Both of which are more about general policy than bitcoin-specific?

I think it is. Tulips, John Law and South Sea Bubble et all.

No serious government cannot allow it's monetary policy to get out of control. And no one will.

As long as bitcoin were an aberration it had been tolerated. Not anymore.

For a totalitarian country, yes.

In almost any category conceivable (police presence on the streets, incarceration weights, bureaucratic oversight), the PRC is significantly more libertarian than the US. It is true that the CIA has invested a tremendous amount of energy and money into political issues designed to delegitimize the CCP -- Tibet, Falun Gong, and Taiwan. Liberalizing speech around these topics would likely be more efficient counterstrategy than the current approach, which is a remnant of an older model of socialist statecraft.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall

Libertarianism depends on the rule of law. A central party system where the government always has total authority and is exempt from even the rules it sets is kinda the opposite of libertarian.

"Any category conceivable" here means "a bunch of categories I cherry-picked."

I can "conceive" of many categories in which the US is less totalitarian: freedom of speech and of the press, judicial independence, not having to show ID to buy train tickets or prepaid SIM cards, freedom of assembly, severity of punishment for minor drug crimes, ...

The US isn't perfect, but let's not exaggerate.

Well, for a country that doesn't want capital flight, anyway. I mean, you want those capitalist rats to know that they'll go down with the ship, after all.

This isn't driven by Communist ideology; if it were, we'd see a return back to Mao's vaguely Marxist policy, not a continuation of Deng; the Chinese are fine with capitalists.

Why would it? The govt let's you go to casino, I should be allowed to do what I want with my money. Totalitarian and Aldo totalitarian govts are scared of bitcoin.

Governments can trace the money you win and lose at a casino.

I can't agree more

HN like Bitcoin because it is cool. HN hates government intervention in general. The outcome is pretty predictable.

HN has a fair amount of "Bitcoin is overvalued" people as well. Note that the type of thread to reach the top of HN tends to be something groundbreaking, which will skew the discussion to the extremes.

Also, the comment you are responding to complained about all of three pro-bitcoin comments (Two top level) that were all posted less than 3 minutes before his.

This seems a little unfair to me as it's possible that this thread was likely buried (hence no replies for >1h) and just surfaced to the top of HN.

I speculate there's a lot more resentment on HN towards cryptocurrencies than you might expect.

Agree. HN has a sizeable left-leaning and pro-state/pro-fiat population.

Not sure about the readership,though. But I think you're right with regards to the discussion - you only hear one side a lot which makes it appear that there is only one side which is the majority. But it's really not the case, however: opposing views are being bashed or brigaded to the point where expressing such views has become unsafe or too much effort. So instead of real discussion, people who are not left-leaning/pro-state/pro-fiat increasingly just use only karma buttons.

I consider that the point of having karma: Spend it in discussions where I disagree with the HN hivemind. ;)

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