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Comment by mrb | Hacker News Reader

This sort of financial censorship is a textbook example of a problem perfectly solved by Bitcoin-class cryptocurrencies. A censorship-resistant digital currency may not be useful to you personally, but it's painfully obvious there are heaps of people who legitimately need them in our modern world for use cases that would never cross your mind.

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Bitcoin isn't censorship resistant when you want to pay out into real money. The exchanges can block it, especially if you're on one of the various "do not trade" lists.

You don't get it. The full benefits of Bitcoin are realized when you stay in the system. Receive BTC. Spend BTC. Avoid converting to fiat ("real money") when possible. As adoption increases[1] year-over-year it becomes increasingly feasible to do that, to stay in the system.

[1] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactions.ht...

Ah, so where in Iran can I live only using Bitcoin and no paper money whatsoever?

No part of this story happened in Iran. It was a US American sending money to a US American media website.

> On January 3, a reader tried to make a donation of $10 to The Grayzone through PayPal. The small donor, a US citizen who lives in California, wrote the following message to accompany the donation: “Thanks for all your excellent work and especially the Gray Zone’s coverage of the murder of Soleimani and war with Iran. You fellows are so insightful and brilliant.”

I’m sure you’d have no trouble finding someone in Iran willing to take BTC and pay literally anything for you.

Sure, there’s still paper money involved at some point. But there’s no need to use western exchanges directly.

I did not say that it was possible to live using Bitcoin in Iran. Read my comment again.

I would argue that the problem is that nothing about Bitcoin is feasible to carry any large scale system that could handle even one country's day-to-day transactions. At best, Bitcoin is currently an instrument for investors at wallstreet to make even crazier bets than normal, it's not a good tool for actual money.

Huh? The world is full of exchangers that require no KYC whatsoever.

The Russian guy who pays my rent with SEPA transfers has never asked for my name.

Not certain, but I think most of the time, rent will be under the amount/volume threshold for KYC requirements.

My rent is firmly in the Bay Area territory, so probably not.

Anyway, none of these guys do KYC.

Atleast once your tax office wants some details, using an exchange without KYC requirements could net you some trouble. Doesn't really fix that Bitcoin is at best pseudonymous, not anonymous. If any of your addresses is linked to your bank account, then your identity is linked to your wallet.

Totally not. Cryptocurrencies are even worse than real money when your government can just shut down or filter/watch the internet and whatnot.

you comment as if bitcoin and other currencies aren't used DAILY for transactions (that get cashed out regularly by the way) by people who got their coin in shady ways and want to get their cash without interference. There are all sorts of fairly simple ways to circumvent the supposed obstacles you mention and they're especially useful for controversial donation-type scenarios like the above. As long as the crypto being sent has been anonymized along the way, anyone in any fully registered exchange in any given country could easily cash it out without there being any connection to the crypto having come from a donation to some X site that's politically controversial.. This is basic stuff. Despite inherent flaws, it works for these types of things and definitely more so than paypal or other large companies which regularly freeze transactions for all sorts of bullshit moral, political, social and etc reasons that don't even require illegal activity.

Crypto may be sort of crappy for major money laundering (drug cartels and mafias already get plenty of help on that from happy managers at huge "respectable" banks, see case of HSBC and Mexican cartels as an example) but crypto could definitely work for small transactions that aren't illegal but very likely to be blacklisted by companies like paypal.

I mean, if I were running a wikileaks, porno or similar type site, crypto is exactly what would be a useful fail-safe. It may be imperfect and I know the HN crowd has an emotionally laughable collective disdain for it but let's use some common sense no? Instead of just criticizing groundlessly.

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