Hacker News Reader

Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

> Taxation is an explicit act that is visible on your paycheck.

You don't have to tax in a hard money environment, you can borrow. That's how wars have been funded in the past. You sell bonds. There's no reason to think a bond market would disappear under a hard money environment is there? You a can borrow against Bitcoin today lol. With 125X leverage!

> Note: personally I do not agree with your hypothesis that we should restrict the monetary tools of criminals. I think instead we should focus on the underlying crime itself

Por que no los dos?

Restricting guns leads to less gun crime. Restricting financial tools leads to less financial crime. Restricting access to bomb-making equipment makes it harder to create bombs. I'm fine with all that.

View on HN

Your argument is restricting financial tools lead to less crime, yet your example is that if war criminals don't fund via debasement they'll just fund via bonds. So which is it, restricting does or doesn't help stop crime?

In a hard money/cryptocurrency environment, the BTC plutocrats would decide when to go to war, and with whom, since no lending or spending would be possible without their assent.

Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing depends on the character of the small number of people "hodling" the majority of the BTC. I expect it would be a catastrophe after a generation or two of inherited BTC wealth, with BTC "nobles" raising private armies attack each other and lord it over the population.

>In a hard money/cryptocurrency environment, the BTC plutocrats would decide when to go to war, and with whom, since no lending or spending would be possible without their assent.

Yes I recall the great Swiss Civil War of the 1990s, when the holders of the gold backed Francs fought for spoils of each canton. Perhaps our Polish friend can chime in on the horrors of the refugees he saw.

>no lending or spending would be possible without their assent

Lending and spending shouldn't be possible without the assent from those which the money comes. Involuntarily spending someone else's money is also known as theft.

You are indicting the greater system you think Bitcoin represents (which resembles sort of monarchy or feudalism). You ignore that this system has been overcome even with those transacting in hard currencies. This reads of fear mongering or some desire to emulate Nostradamus.

The greater system Bitcoin would represent, assuming wide future adoption, would be a plutocracy, which I stated in the earlier post. If early adopters maintain the anything close proportion of BTC they currently hold, they'd form a small wealthy overclass; and if the lending and spending necessary for society to function is controlled by them, they'd effectively control society. It wouldn't resemble Switzerland at all.

I wouldn't expect those plutocrats to get along in perpetuity, and if there's no way to expropriate their inheritances, they'd form a permanent class of (potential) warlords.

That's quite an interesting tale Mr. Nostradamus!

The state is not a private entity and so what limits a private entity’s criminality need not have the same impact on the state. One can borrow with full faith and credit. These restrictions you have synthesized have no impact on the state. The state is the will of the people and only the voters can stop this activity. Remember when the state does it, it’s not really crime from the perspective of the state itself, just something you disagree with. This is why checks and balances exist and matter and also have nothing to do with monetary policy.

You've done plenty of hand wringing of red herrings about what the state is and isn't, but you've dodged the question. Does restriction of financial tools that are used to abet crime help reduce crime or not?

Unless you have a problem with the Nuremburg trials and you think the holocaust was just a gentleman's disagreement between the Jews and German government, I think you understand the government is capable of crime.

> The state is the will of the people

There's certainly an argument to be made here currency debasement is not necessarily the will of the people, unless you truly think the people of Zimbabwe or Venezuela wanted to see their already inflating bills lose value even faster as the government printed more to fund the wages and ill-gotten gains of corrupt bureaucrats.

> You've done plenty of hand wringing of red herrings about what the state is and isn't, but you've dodged the question.

I really haven't done either of these things haha, I suspect you're not following.

> Unless you have a problem with the Nuremburg trials and you think the holocaust was just a gentleman's disagreement between the Jews and German government, I think you understand the government is capable of crime.

The question of whether a state can commit a crime is a difficult one because the state itself decides what is and is not a crime domestically. When you throw someone in a locked room, it's kidnapping, but when the state does it, it's an arrest. Abortion is legal in some states now, not in others. The same action committed in different places may or may not be a crime depending on which state you're physically located.

A crime in the legal sense is defined as "an action or omission that constitutes an offense that may be prosecuted by the state and is punishable by law."

With respect to the Holocaust some aspects were criminal and some were redefined not to be crimes in Germany by the Nazis. In a real way the fact a lot of it either wasn't a crime or wasn't prosecuted is the reason the war happened. To make it a crime, and to prosecute it.

When you go to that extreme, you usually land on "yeah, you and who's army?"

More on the notion of state crimes here. [1]

For a state to commit a crime, it's not as simple as you make it out to be, see Article 19 paragraph 2 of the ILC Draft Articles on State Responsibility. It has to be an internationally wrongful act, resulting from the breach of an International obligation which is essential for the protection of fundamental interests of the international community and also be recognized as a crime by that community as a whole.

Under that framework you can see why whether the Holocaust was a crime in Nazi Germany or not is more challenging to answer, whereas the international community decided that - under that framework - it was, and well, we had a war over it to make sure that international definition matched up with the domestic one.

So we circle back to...

> Does restriction of financial tools that are used to abet crime help reduce crime or not?

I think you'll find that overwhelmingly financial matters do not rise to the level of international crimes under the ILC Draft Articles on State Responsibility. This leaves it largely to the state to define.

Therefore, given that the state broadly decides in financial matters what is and is not criminal the state really isn't in a position to commit financial crimes at home - as they can simply change the law to define them as legal without running afoul of the aforementioned. Individuals can. And therefore, broadly speaking, no, the restriction of financial tools does not reduce the ability of a state to commit crimes. It does in fact prevent individuals from committing crimes as defined by said state.

You're asking for a simple answer to a very complex question.

> There's certainly an argument to be made here currency debasement is not necessarily the will of the people, unless you truly think the people of Zimbabwe or Venezuela wanted to see their already inflating bills lose value even faster as the government printed more to fund the wages and ill-gotten gains of corrupt bureaucrats.

Sure, and we call that a failed state. In a failed state, you have bigger problems than your currency (like violence, bloodshed and a devastated economy) - and once you resolve your governance issues, your currency will no longer be a problem.

[1] http://www.ejil.org/pdfs/10/2/592.pdf

I follow perfectly. If the state commits things other people call war crimes (such as blowing up innocent little Afghani kids), it isn't a crime. So your answer is that reducing the financial tools available to the state for harming innocents does not help reduce war crimes. You've simply defined crime in a way that avoids having to answer the question directly.

So lets rephrase the question:

Does restriction of financial tools that are used to abet the harming of innocent victims (which virtually everyone else but you refers to as a crime) help reduce the harming of those victims or not?

> Does restriction of financial tools that are used to abet the intentional harming of innocent victims (which virtually everyone else but you refers to as a crime) help reduce the harming of those victims or not?

No it does not, because the state can simply borrow from its people. The state will not be limited in its ability to carry out these actions.

Only individuals who try and commit financial crimes will be materially impacted.

Again the question you keep dodging is what makes you think the government won't be able to borrow to fund its wars in exactly the same way it does now, and exactly the same way it did for hundreds of years under sound money?

> Which virtually everyone else but you refers to as a crime.

Uh, if they did it would be a crime. But you're gonna need to cite some sources! More than likely the international community is onboard because the target state violated international norms and they see this as the lesser of two evils, and therefore not a crime.

Don't project your morality here :) we're talking about a very difficult concept. There's no right or wrong here, no absolutes. Just minimization of harm. Nobody's flying this ship!

>No it does not, because the state can simply borrow from its people.

Thank you. Now that we've established that restricting financial tools does not stop the harming of innocent victims, it follows that a state such as El Salvador adopting bitcoin (or for instance, an allegedly untraceable currency such as monero) as legal tender as part of its monetary policy does not lead to increased harming of innocents. Those with desire to harm others, including those in government, could simply borrow or trade fiat from the other ilk who like to harm others.

You now understanding why restricting crypto doesn't prevent the underlying crimes (now a criminal just has to steal your identity or use one of the other gazillion illegal and legal ways to move funds) to transfer his funds abroad instead of using coinbase and a cellphone. Killing the legality of crypto stops the law abiding unbanked from having a very low cost means of international transfer.

You understand now that restricting access to fertilizer to prevent bombs is stupid, because now the common man who grows food can no longer provide the grain stock for the nation. Or restricting guns from the peaceful is asinine because it disarms the innocent against the criminal who can buy a gun readily on the black market virtually anywhere in the world or failing that 3d print a very reliable one for only a few hundred dollars including ammunition out of unrestricted materials even in Europe.

> But you're gonna need to cite some sources!

You're the first person who's ever actually demanded from me I cite the fact that the US has harmed innocents in war, but here you go![1]. That's just one bombing, there's plenty more acts such as as the My Lai massacre but I don't enjoy seeing more pictures of dead 2 year olds which you say is the "will of the people" since it was done by the government. Or perhaps we are a "failed" state?

>Don't project your morality here :)

Is it even a contentious subject that the bombing of innocents is wrong? What about the killing of nuns in El Salvador by US backed regime? Why do you think discussion of morality is off limits? If there is to be a government, is it not just that it at least be used to deal with the most gravest of brutal acts such as the killing of innocents?

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/29/asia/afghanistan-kabul-evacua...

Your entire follow up made no sense. You misunderstood and misrepresented everything I said either intentionally or unintentionally. This is in spite of my painstaking effort to explain it to you. Unfortunately you're either not arguing in good faith or incapable of continuing this discourse. Either way, cheers, and have a good night.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com