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Comment by Qasaur | Hacker News Reader

>Buying drugs, money laundering, rampant speculation, rug pulls, fraud, high fees, inefficiency, horrible UX, irreversible SFYL, and destroying the climate.

Every one of these charges happens every day and in some of them to a much greater scale in fiat, especially climate destruction due to inflationary monetary policy, which encourages consumption and waste and punishes thrift and savings.

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This is just another form of the "we should ban encryption because criminals use it" argument.

Criminals and wrongdoers will always exist. Statists and financiers are just another category of them, who have a system that conveniently covers their crimes. I will put all my weight behind anything that weakens their power over me: I.e cryptography and cryptocurrency.

It's much harder to do ransomware payments with non-crypto.

Sure, but ransomware is just extortion and that is a concept that has existed for time immemorial. I think ransomware is a relatively small part of the global volume of generalised extortion which is almost certainly mostly settled in fiat and not crypto.

Ransomware would be eliminated if we just banned computers and made the internet illegal.

I find it strange that so many cryto people get so emotional when such comments are made. It makes it rather difficult to have an actual discussion on the issues.

It's difficult to have an actual discussion when the same old platitudes keep reappearing in every crypto discussion.

I can rephrase as a question: Should we stop using groundbreaking and individual-empowering technologies just because some criminals benefit? Every single technology is exploted by criminals. I fail to see how that is an argument for its disavowal. If anything, we need to normalise privacy and encryption among virtuous everyday individuals.

You'd get emotional too, if somebody started calling out the pyramid scheme you out your money in.

And knives can kill people

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