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Comment by kyruzic | Hacker News Reader

This style of straw man argument only serves as a means for _you_ to justify your own perspective. Be careful with these, they are how the extreme fringe (flat earth, anti-vax, etc) get to where they are.

I think you’ll find the vast number of people here do not care, just like they are not salty they didn’t buy a winning lotto ticket.

How many were convinced by hackernews sentiment to not buy Bitcoin when it was <$1k or Ethereum <$100?

raises hand

Not being interested in a technology is one thing, but the amount that people have an interest in being against Bitcoin is fascinating.

I’m only a little bit salty. Part of me cannot believe the government (or whatever powers that run this world) allows a deflationary alternative currency to continue to exist. I feel that it’s only allowed to continue in order to build a case for central bank cryptos that can substituted during an inevitable and convenient crisis.

Crypto people do not seem to have endeared themselves to regular folk whose assistance will no doubt be needed to prevent such government intervention.

The whole design of bitcoin was to make it difficult or impossible for governments to stop it existing. If you were the head of some government how would you do that? It's open source software that can be run on pretty much any computer in the world.

I’d do it slowly by tainting certain known addresses, money laundering, tax evasion, terrorism, scams etc. It splits the world into tainted coin and untainted, all regulated exchanges will be unable to accept tainted coin. Then expand what gets tainted to include coin with unknown provenance. Also you can get tainted if you send to a tainted address so you have to be careful who you send it to. Then when the details of who is on both sides of the transaction are known I would tax it. Anyone who doesn’t pay gets tainted.

I would also secretly run tumbling services....

After running a publicly massive campaign against bitcoin et al, I would allow conversion to a fed coin for anyone who can prove the coins were legitimately acquired. The conversion rate would be set favorably to the govt. Anyone who complains gets investigated.

Good luck with that. You sure sound smarter than the US and Chinese gov who are both desperate to ban it.

I don’t think they are desperate to ban it right away, even if they say they are. It takes a long time to sneak in new powers into international trade agreements. It also takes a long time for an exploitable crisis to occur. They don’t want to be seen as handicapping innovation and cutting ordinary people off from a way to get rich. So they’ll wait however long it takes for people to lose faith, which could be a really long time.

I personally don’t believe those with the power to decide money supply will give it up easily.

Haha, thats me right there!

This is true.

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