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Comment by notch656a | Hacker News Reader

>it's about people's willingness to run illegal services.

Which looks to be quite high.

>Nope, sorry. The market doesn't guarantee whatever random distributed thing you like will be resilient.

While I'm sure 'nope, sorry' felt gratifying for you to type, the market cares very little about your individual opinion. Even illegal drugs, tangible items that a drug dog might sniff out, can't be choked off.

>whatever random distributed thing you like

The 'whatever random distributed thing I like' is something with a market cap of 2.21 Trillion dollars, which is like 1/10th the GDP of the united states. You make it sound like it's my random pet individual project.

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> While I'm sure 'nope, sorry' felt gratifying for you to type, the market cares very little about your individual opinion. Even illegal drugs, tangible items that a drug dog might sniff out, can't be choked off.

Lol. Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies aren't illegal drugs, and thinking they would be as resilient as them is missing many important differences. For one, networks are far easier to surveil than physical spaces. For another, about the only thing cryptocurrencies are actually good for is speculation, so there'd be few incentives to keep them going in the face of severe penalties. That quite unlike drugs, which get you high and in some cases can get you addicted, so there's some natural demand.

> The 'whatever random distributed thing I like' is something with a market cap of 2.21 Trillion dollars, which is like 1/10th the GDP of the united states. You make it sound like it's my random pet individual project.

Speculators driving up the price is not proof of resilience. Bitcoin is a technology in search of a real problem to solve, not an actual good solution to anything.

Bitcoin/crypto as you say are not illegal drugs. There's no inherent moral outrage like there would be for murder/rape/theft/selling crack to an addict slowly poisoning himself and visibly robbing his neighbors. Convincing the populace to wage the kind of war-on-drugs style attack that would be necessary to snuff it out will be even more difficult to sell to populace than it was to sell the need to imprison drug dealers.

All I can say about stopping crypto-currency, is good luck. The Crypto Stasi or whatever oppressive mechanism that would be needed to actually snuff it out will have to shoot me in the head to make me stop. I'd happily keep trading and mining crypto from cellphone smuggled up someone's ass into the prison or whatever else is needed to keep the system going.

> All I can say about stopping crypto-currency, is good luck. The Crypto Stasi or whatever oppressive mechanism that would be needed to actually snuff it out will have to shoot me in the head to make me stop. I'd happily keep trading and mining crypto from cellphone smuggled up someone's ass into the prison or whatever else is needed to keep the system going.

What an utterly bizarre attitude.

Also, you do realize if what you describe is what it takes to keep cryptocurrency going; it would be actually, really dead-dead, despite you and a few hold outs trading it from prison ass-phones forever and keeping the technical infrastructure barely alive? To put it in crypto-terms: at that point Bitcoin will be a Shitcoin.

You asked for resiliency, I merely provided an example of it. Of course not everyone can be imprisoned, so it's pretty unrealistic to think only ass-phones would mine bitcoin/crypto.

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