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Comment by beebmam | Hacker News Reader

There's so much scamming around cryptocurrencies. I personally lost several thousand dollars from the Nano/BitGrail scam.

A dear friend of mine delved into cryptocurrencies specifically to buy drugs, and he gets them shipped through the US postal service all the time. He regularly abuses ketamine and LSD in large doses and has done serious harm to his health with them.

It's deeply depressing to me what has happened to this dream of internet currencies, and I hope that the US justice department can clean this garbage up.

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I realize this is a website primarily about startups rather than literal hackers, but the sentiment in your post that the government should protect us from risky investments and putting things in our bodies has to be about as far from the hacker ethos as I think I’ve seen. Getting scammed is infuriating and its sad to see drug addiction affect friends but as someone who has worked closely with some of these agencies giving them control over more of American life is not the answer to anything.

Just for the record I've been utilizing LSD and other psychedelics with no ill effects and many positive effects for the past 30 years with no involvement of cryptocurrencies whatsoever.

As far as the rest of it, obviously the blockchain fails quickly for day-to-day currency uses, and that's blatantly obvious. So it's a store of wealth, maybe a tax dodge, but hardly all that 'revolutionary'.

You getting scammed is on you. I'm sorry it happened to you and it's happened to me too but you knew the risks when you entered and if you didn't you ought to have informed yourself. Looking up with your arms open crying, "Save us!" From who? Yourself and your mistakes? I don't need the SEC shutting Telegram's decentralized initiative down because they're "worried about the investor". That's an excuse for strong-arming and it's deplorable.

Most of the SEC's actions around cryptocurrency have been in this fashion not in protecting the investors from real scam projects. Coinbase, Telegram, Ripple: none of these companies fits the definition of a scam yet the SEC had a field day going after them in public, at least in two of these three cases after these companies had been privately assured by the SEC they were good to launch.

So what's the solution? Throw users into prison? We tried that. It doesn't work.

Ah, but it did work.

It decimated communities of color and set them back economically and socially, increasing the competitive advantage of "the right kind of people".

Only black people do drugs? Let me guess, black people will also be disproportionately arrested for crypto crimes?

Supposedly studies show black people using drugs at lower rates though more likely to be arrested for doing so.

I think the point is our system tends to target the disadvantaged.

They're already disproportionately arrested for all the other crimes, so...

Ever been on a res?

Another solution would to outlaw or super-regulate the US postal service... Blaming infrastructure only gets you so far.

any dream involving humans, large bunch of them, will never be a dream

In Boston, there is an area called Mass and Cass which is full of drugs users. Crime is endemic as well as rape and overdoses.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/10/06/opinion/everyone-want...

This exists without anyone ordering their drugs in the darknet. Not sure why crypto is called out for drug problems.

Since that area already exists in Boston, I guess we should do not anything about illegal drugs sold over the Internet.

Something tells me the amount of drugs purchased with fiat currency is exponentially more than the amount purchased with cryptocurrency.

Are we suggesting removing cash because it’s used to buy drugs? No.

exponential in what?

> Something tells me the amount of drugs purchased with fiat currency is exponentially more than the amount purchased with cryptocurrency.

In raw numbers? Sure. Everyone uses fiat and nobody uses cryptocurrenices.

If you compare percentage of transactions, though, cryptocurrencies are almost all illegal transactions.

Rookie mistake comparing raw numbers and not percentages.

> cryptocurrencies are almost all illegal transactions.

Citation needed.

This argument was potentially accurate as late as 2015, but given the fact that Bitcoin is so much easier to purchase and is considered an investment, I think you’re seeing the lawful and legitimate use of Bitcoin much more than for illegal purposes.

If your next argument is, “Not every Bitcoin transaction is for illegal purposes but every illegal transaction uses Bitcoin”, the same could be said of cash.

How could you possibly have enough information to claim that "almost all" crypto transactions are illegal? As someone who works in crypto, I find this claim highly dubious.

We should: just make them all legal

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