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Comment by jstanley | Hacker News Reader

At least your Bitcoin isn't going to be yanked out from underneath you overnight by the government:

For example, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/08/india-withdraw...

You're really twisting what happened here. It wasn't so much "yanked" as it was "replaced". I was initially against the idea, but soon got around to it. It was a very risky and daring move by the government, but it was a good one.

How do you even measure it. What's the metric. How do you classify it as good or bad. It was clearly short-sighted and the government even failed to account the size of the new currency notes and the inconvenience caused by it. All that was achieved was dip in the GDP and the loss of lives.

Contrary to the popular belief that BTC purports money laundering, it can actually mitigate the problem of black money and money laundering. The governments all around the world should try to keep up and they should themselves establish a separate think tank/research arm/department for blockchain and cryptocurrency space.

That same government is perfectly capable of throwing you into a deep dark hole until you comply with their demands or die of old age. I understand you have a particular ideological viewpoint, but that shouldn’t prevent you from understanding how the world actually works. There is no end run to your dream of how society should be, and pretending that there is simply divorces you from that reality.

To be clear I’m not saying that things can’t change, but I am saying the change has to take place in reality and not your imagination.

Not yet. You bet your ass that if Bitcoin gets large enough State actors will use coercion to regulate it, track it, tax it, and do what bureaucracies do best. Nothing escapes the Leviathan. The USA uses Eminent Domain to steal land, and uses laws to deny gold as a currency, what's stopping congress from doing the same with cryptocurrencies.

I mean people are acting as if governments in past haven't faced similar problems. The only real value of currency is if a STATE actor accepts it as payment. Otherwise international trade, commerce, taxes, etc. would all be moot. So Bitcoin can never be a large scale, nationwide, let alone international currency. Even though currently it is large, and getting recognition from State actors, but it's not large enough to enter the domain of legislation.

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