Comment by CryptoPunk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CryptoPunk | Hacker News Reader

Since he doesn't allow non-vetted (not politically aligned) Twitter accounts to respond to his tweet, I'll respond to it here:

The Ransomware sector was enabled by cryptocurrency in the same way entire classes of crime were enabled by the internet.

You need to take the good with the bad with any transformative technology. The good, in the case of cryptocurrency, includes:

* hundreds of millions of people potentially being empowered to earn income by sharing in the revenue their social media content generates, via community currencies, like the /r/CryptoCurrency ERC20 token, Moon [1] [2] [3] [4] [5].

* people living under repressive governments being able to escape their capital controls and survive [6]

As for the bad, this may end up being the lesser of two evils. The other, potentially greater evil is that the security vulnerabilities are never exploited in a dramatic and public fashion that alerts the organizations that they afflict, leading to years of undetected information theft, or potentially even worse, the vulnerabilities being exploited all at once in a cataclysmic cyber attack by a state-level adversary to the US.

The potential for ransomware acts as a bug bounty and canary, uncovering security holes, and incentivizing organizations to fill them. It could lead to a much more hardened network computing infrastructure.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/l9dye7/i_so...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/kqrikd/sold...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/n371id/how_...

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ly79uw/as_a...

[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/l9bdtn/guys...

[6] https://twitter.com/Codiox/status/1375876968390909956

They could still do that if significant regulation is put in place to enforce things like KYC/AML, and strictly regulate places where cryptocurrency touches the 'real' economy.

This twitter thread doesn't necessarily call for an outright ban, it criticises what he terms as "regulatory impotence" in this area.

The reason why cryptocurrency has the benefits it does is that it is highly impervious to third party intervention, whether that intervention is repressive regulation (which by the way, I would count KYC/AML laws as, after experiencing the financial exclusion and privacy violation it causes), benevolent regulation or just some party seeking to engage in rent-seeking, as in the case of a company with a locked in customer base raising fees to above what is economically optimal.

The only way to eliminate its negative effects is to obviate its core properties of permissionless-ness and decentralization.

If those have to be given up, then let it be so.

I don't see that either of those qualities is essential to the benefits you proposed above.

The benefits I referred to come from the fact that people all over the world can count on the protocol remaining globally accessible and apolitical/neutral. Without that, there would be no global adoption of the value transmission protocol to make the assets issued on top of Ethereum useful at the global scale.

We cannot count only on the political system to maintain liberties. We need non-political institutions like cash, and its electronic corollary, cryptocurrency, to ensure certain freedoms, even in the case where the political system fails.

When you put in KYC/AML in place, you lose ability to employ people in restricted countries easily. How do you employ someone in Iran if the US government or Iranian government is against? Bypassing regulations is a great perk.

Some folks would say that restricting such arrangements would be a good outcome.

> Bypassing regulations is a great perk.

For illegal arrangements, sure. You may think your government shouldn't inflict such restrictions, but empowering everyone to just ignore them is unlikely to lead to good outcomes.

If a developer in Iran wants to work with a company in the US and they are prevented in doing so, it might be illegal, but it is ethical to bypass such a regulation.

Why is it ethical?

What if inflows of cryptocurrency to Iran are used to further a radical clerical agenda and foment war, torture and mass disruption?

It depends on how you define ethics. I am for example deongological rational egoist. I can decide for myself if my acts of sending money to Iran are ethical. In my case, I send them to people who are aginst the regime, don't torture anyone and are secular. So I exchange good work of good people for value they otherwise couldn't get. This is what matters. Voters', politicians' ideas and opinions, etc. does not.

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