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Comment by petters | Hacker News Reader

> And that is, unsurprisingly (and quite banally), used by many detractors to dismiss it all

There is a stronger argument against crypto: the main use case (outside speculation) seems to be illegal activities. If what you are doing is legal, why not use government currency? If what you are doing is illegal, crypto is great. A currency outside the control of the government (police) is almost by definition made for illegal activities.

In some countries, illegal activities are morally correct, though. Crypto helps here.

But crypto has enabled entirely new types of crimes that did not exist before: ransomware.

I have not completely for or against crypto. I am responding to your comment that people are dismissing because it seems like speculation only. I don't think that is true and that there are better reasons for dismissal?

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If by trying to avoid aiding and abbeting the system described as:

> …giant banks and institutions received trillions of dollars in unprecedented bail outs [1] while 'main street' suffered with record unemployment, foreclosures, and destruction of small businesses.

> People rightfully realized that perhaps government should not have absolute and total control of the monetary supply and financial system.

Is defined as illegal in of itself by a government, then sure, there's no argument against dismissing it as illegal. Just like PGP falling under being illegal (from another comment) because it could exist as:

> digital copies of the binaries and source code were prohibited for export as a munition

There's no successful argument one can make against such illegality to said government. And I wouldn't bother, such people will never acquiesce if they haven't felt the lack of sufficient recourse to [1] (because they quite possibly may gain a lot of benefits by being indirectly or directly involved in [1])

Luckily, reality isn't so rigid as to what people (or even other traditional governments abroad) will actually accept (then and now) and have sovereignty over deciding what they want for themselves and side stepping based on what can actually be enforced in totality in practice regardless of what any given institutionalized jurisdiction may think of it.

1. Why does FedEx exist? If what you are doing is legal, shouldn't you use USPS?

2. There are plenty of things that are federally illegal but many consider to be morally legal. Examples include, for example, weed dispensaries operating in states that have legislated cannabis.

3. What happens if a future government makes funding of ETE encrypted software, without CSAM scanning, illegal?

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