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Comment by sitepodmatt | Hacker News Reader

It's refreshing that a country can act this quickly even if we don't agree with the action. In many countries this would require several meeting of understanding, a dozen committees forming sub-committees, accusations of corruptions and biased interest and several related court cases, and endless other shit. IMO it's actually a very smart move, to ensure a fair and complete dissolution, and if those execs dont have the bitcoin to distribute back to participants (i.e. they've been speculating or liquidating client BTC) then they're going to jail. China doesn't want the egg on face that Mt.gox / Mark Karpeles caused.

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> It's refreshing that a country can act this quickly

I'll remind you of how refreshing it is when I drag your family off the gulag without warrant. Its not "refreshing", its scary.

First off - no one has been dragged off, they are merely preventing the exchange operators (that are originally resident in China anyway) from leaving the country until they execute an orderly shutdown. i.e. No holidays for now, we don't want you doing a MarkK. Also, we are talking China here not NK, but don't let the facts get in the way of your point. Btw, you do have "temporary injunctions" in other parts of the world too.

> no one has been dragged off

same is as true for N. Korea

China sounds great, you should apply for citizenship?

Which is not so easy to get from what I heard of.

It's almost impossible for foreigners

Not almost, there are whooping 48 or 49 naturalized Chinese citizens who got citizenship through means other than marriage since the naturalization law was introduced 1998

That may all be true in this instance, but previously, executives have been executed for various things. The story I recall was some sort of fraud, but who knows what the real reason was. I don't have a reference handy unfortunately.

you're espousing the benefits of autocratic control. I am describing the trade-off. Sure, maybe China isn't dragging people off to gulags today but the point is that autocratic control means they can if they want to.

They are kidnapping or taking people away still today. They are kidnapping people like the folks in hong kong who publish books the leaders don't like, here's an article https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/17/china-behaving...

Do you think there'll end up being due process with this approach? And fair trials? I wouldn't be so quick to endorse a dictatorship's approach to law and justice.

>It's refreshing that a country can act this quickly even if we don't agree with the action.

Once you really consider that idea a bit more you may realize it's actually the exact opposite - it's refreshing when a powerful country can't move quickly, can't get anything done fast, and has tons of gridlock due to differing opinions combined with strongly institutionalized laws and procedures. Human beings are terribly whimsical creatures, and institutions that prevent us from acting on our whims and instead force us to go through a thoroughly deliberative process are one of mankind's greatest inventions.

Thank-you for illustrating the reason we have elected, republican governments in the west and in addition have a non-popular voting system for the president in the United States(I don't mean the party of the same name, I mean the style of government).

Despite the horrors history will offer up, we as a species continue to fail to comprehend the danger of a government unrestrained by its populace. We somehow think that we will create a government that can "move fast" but not abuse its capability to do so while we are proven wrong time and time again. Thus, limited governments ever suspect by their populace are necessary to ensure opinions as illustrated above do not come to bear...

Rule of law is important for civil society to function well in the long term...

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