Hacker News Reader

Comment by almost_usual | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin will never be true decentralization because the real world runs on centralized violence and power grabs.

True decentralization means you don't get to complain when Bitcoin is used to do everything you hate.

You don't get to complain when honest people lose cumulatively billions of their hard earned savings to scammers and hackers.

You don't get to complain when peope hire hitmen, buy drugs and child porn with it.

You don't get to complain when data mining centers hook illegally to the power grid and steal millions of dollars of energy.

Or when countries avoid sanctions, or manipulate other countries through it.

That's precisely what decentralization and deregulation looks like. It's the law of the jungle. Enjoy.

All those things were already illegal (worse yet, immoral) whether you pay for them in fiat or in Bitcoin. That's a false equivalence.

That's the whole point. They're illegal/immoral, but decentralization means you can't mitigate them despite that.

Tell me when is the last time a drug dealer used a wire transfer with reason "for the cocain"? Oh they don't do that. I wonder why.

Drug dealers use wire transfers all the time.

And there are benefits to being able to stop governments from controlling people. I would say the benefits of this far outweigh giving the state an even greater power advantage over non-state actors that may be acting maliciously.

So for me, yes, decentralization please.

Most of the thing you listed are illegal, and paying them with Bitcoins don't make them magically legal.

If someone makes an "Uber for hitmen", it will still be illegal in spite someone is using an app to hire them and paying them with their altcoins.

Honestly it's very disappointing I have to explain this but I NEVER ARGUED THE LEGALITY STATUS of these activities.

I argue the fact Bitcoin and other coins enables crime.

I'll make it really simple for you: would you hire a hitman with a briefcase full of cash, or you'd do a bank wire with subject "for the murder, thanks"?

Think why we don't use bank wires for this.

Now think why anonymous cash transfers are hard internationally.

Now think what Bitcoin is. It's anonymous cash over the Internet.

It's a huge enabler for illegal activities because it's anonymous and decentralized and happens over Internet.

You can spin it any way you wish, but the fact speak if you're a criminal, Bitcoin is automatically the most attractive way for making transactions to you, aside from person to person cash briefcases.

Law is centralized by nature. Because law has to be enforced in a centralized nature. Decentralization and anonymity means you can't apply the law. "Illegal" means therefore NOTHING to Bitcoin.

The irony of this whole statement is that bitcoin isnt anonymous! (which is a core reason it lost its intended value as a medium of exchange)

The general sentiment also applies to cash, and the reality is the authorities want to track your every transaction, which is why every opportunity to diminish cash has and will be taken.

It's anonymous because you see wallets, but you don't know who has them. That's what anonymous means.

The reasons you give against Bitcoin can be used also to against encryption.

We agree that hiring a hitman is illegal, and we agree that it will be easier for the police to solve the crimes if encryption is banned and the police can read all the emails/whastapp/whatever of all the people in the city.

Encryption is tolerated because it also allows protecting regular people from criminals, in ways which allowed to build e-commerce on top, and ultimately enabling great economic boom on the Internet. If it was only about securing messaging, it would likely have been banned already.

People forget what the 90s was like (if you had to export out of usa)

You just haven’t had enough time to see why cryptocurrencies should be tolerated. Eventually you will.

I'm tired of this completely wrong argument.

- Encryption doesn't stop law enforcement from having backdoors at key servers, and they do.

- Also we're discussing a financial transaction instrument, which REQUIRES MASS for it to make sense (for it to be valuable for transactions).

- While you can roll your own unique encryption and communication channel and authorities won't know a thing.

So no, situation is completely different with encryption.

I should have written "end to end encryption".

But if you have written it I'd have to note end-to-end encryption (as in truly end-to-end) is rarely applied in the real world.

It doesn't make even pragmatic sense, for ex. how can Apple index and process your photos, if it just sees them as bunch of binary noise? It can't. So it doesn't.

It can't be decentralized to begin with, because whoever has more money can run more mining and whoever mines more has more power in the network. It's still more about rich hording power. On the flipside it may just be a little bit more distributed and accessible than the current prevalent system.

But mining doesn't grant you any power (unless you manage to accumulate 51% of it, which is in this day and age pretty much impossible for a single individual or organization). Mining is just a service that you provide (to secure the network), and you get rewarded for it.

Compare that to how monetary inflation works in the fiat world: they just press a button, et voi-la, they got their funding.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com