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Comment by Crespyl | Hacker News Reader

Roughly as easily as they utilize cell phones.

By which you mean reliance on someone else's system? The marketing copy for Bitcoin is really big on a democratic trust-free distributed model but from the user's perspective it doesn't seem like there's all that much of a difference between “trust this large financial company in your town” and “trust this collection of mining consortiums in different countries”, other than that the transaction fees are considerably higher and there's no recourse in the case of fraud or errors.

>there's no recourse in the case of fraud or errors.

I think this is the biggest problem with cryptocurrencies. Reversible and traceable transactions are a feature of real money, not a bug.

>Reversible and traceable transactions are a feature of real money, not a bug.

That depends. Having a paper trail of your money in local tax office sometimes means you would be shot in a head and buried in a nearest forest.

When armed insurgency happens (and yes, they do happen) all you see in the news is "Country A" occupied parts of "Country B", but on the ground you would have armed people going full-DAESH on local tax offices to see whom to demand ransom from and that would be law-obeying people with paper trail for their earnings.

That seems like a really weird argument to me. First, you’re advocating for tax evasion rather than a particular type of currency, which isn’t a particularly good strategy for avoiding punishment. Second, it’s a really strong argument for cash and against cryptocurrencies — if you’re worried about someone mining your financial history, the last thing you want is to provide a permanent public ledger which cannot be removed (and before someone mentions tumblers, ask whether Daesh would be more likely to say “oh, guess you don’t owe anything” or “you MUST be hiding something, traitor!”).

Looking at the big picture, this is even worse: the way you don’t have Daesh is by having a strong society which has the resources to fight them off. A society with rampant corruption and black market activity is exactly how you create the conditions for them to thrive!

Lots of people like non-traceable transactions. Real money (paper notes, gold coins?) has this property. Do you mean credit card or ACH transactions are real money and paper bills are not?

> Do you mean credit card or ACH transactions are real money and paper bills are not?

No, I just forgot cash existed for a second.

Doesn’t a bitcoin transaction cost a few dollars to put through, these days? There are generally cheaper ways to send money.

Domestically - yes. Internationally - SWIFT is no cheaper really, but comes with some restrictions.

For example I can accept my earned money on account in Ukraine, pay taxes here, but can't send it back to an investment account somewhere EU. This just can't be done.

Even more sillier - some time ago it was illegal to merely have an account in foreign bank without obtaining personal license from central bank here.

So yes, there are cheaper ways and there are simpler things and there was people who were sent to GULAG for doing "illegal money transactions".

Less than half of the world uses a smartphone, which I think would be necessary for BC transactions, would it not?

I do not have a smartphone. I have purchased things using bitcoin. Smartphones are not necessary for BC transactions.

Did you purchase things using bitcoin with some kind of computer other than a smartphone? Or have you discovered a way to use bitcoin without any sort of connection to the internet?

They meant smartphone as opposed to the classic Nokia-style 'dumbphone'.

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