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Comment by amarant | Hacker News Reader

Who are these people who need "privacy and freedom" that can't be had with regular banking?

I mean, it's not like your account balance is public on regular banks..

I struggle to come up with an example which does not involve shady business, and if that's what we want, it seems like a better solution to just legalise those businesses...

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The banks in the US can point-and-click freeze your assets and ability to transact even in the absence of any burden of proof of reasonable suspicion of a crime. They frequently do this upon request from the government well prior to a conviction or even charges.

They did this to Wikileaks, for example, long before any charges against Assange were made public.

It's, to borrow a phrase, "turnkey tyranny", ready for abuse at all times. Those it is wielded against can't then afford representation to get it fixed, as they can't send or receive any payments.

For one, people who live under oppressive regimes.

And people living in oppressive regimes have access to free network infrastructure? That's news to me.

An oppressive regime will just make crypto illegal if they want to, make even possessing cryptographic keys punishable, etc. And crypto transactions make it easier to trace spending to you anyway, especially when the regime can unabashedly MITM any traffic within or into/out of their country, etc...

There are semi-competent oppressive regimes, like china, and incompetent ones, like many in south america. Still useful on a spectrum, and significantly more useful with low-tech or poor oppressive regimes.

Also large orgs run on percentages, economics and so on. Anything that makes it more expensive to be oppressive or change the balance of things is useful. It doesn't have to be a %100 solution to be helpful.

Legal Cannabis stores

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