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Comment by mediocregopher | Hacker News Reader

Let's swap "bitcoin" for "cash" here, since the mechanics remain the same but there's less emotional baggage.

If someone tried to make the argument to me that cash doesn't have finality because your shoebox-in-the-closet-full-of-cash can be stolen from you, I would say they're stretching the definition of "transaction finality" in order to make a banal point.

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This is why so many people absolutely refuse to carry more than a thousand dollar's worth of cash on their person.

Isn't the point that you don't just get to decide whether or not the cash is legally yours? So you might have possession of the box of cash, but might not be the owner, for example.

Sure, but that money you stole buried in your backyard is still yours. The rightful owner cannot just steal it back. Similarly if it wasn't yours, you wouldn't have to pay taxes on it and the IRS still expects taxes on stolen property

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/irs-taxpayers-stolen-items...

> Sure, but that money you stole buried in your backyard is still yours.

In what sense?

> The rightful owner cannot just steal it back.

The rightful owner doesn't get any special rights, so they can't trespass to get their property back. A policeman could get it back for them, though. If it's just lying there they can take it back themselves. I've heard stories where people find their stolen property on Craigslist, meet with the thief, and steal it back without using force. That's fine.

> Similarly if it wasn't yours, you wouldn't have to pay taxes on it

Ownership is a tricky concept. There are many rights and responsibilities associated with ownership. Owning a bike carries a different set of rights and responsibilities from owning a house. Paying taxes on something is an obligation typically associated with ownership, but since stealing something does not create many of the other legal rights associated with ownership I don't think it's sufficient to say that it demonstrates that it's "yours." Also, of course, no one actually pays the taxes.

> A policeman could get it back for them, though.

What cop do you know would just steal property back for you? This a matter for courts.

> I've heard stories where people find their stolen property on Craigslist, meet with the thief, and steal it back without using force. That's fine.

What happens on Craigslist encounters is not exactly common law.

> Florida’s theft laws make it clear that theft of any type is illegal, but recently one Florida court has put a different spin on the situation. In the case of T.D.W. v. State, 42 So. 3d 959 (Fla. 4th DCA 2010), the juvenile defendant (FYI, juvenile names are always abbreviated) was convicted of Robbery because he forcefully approached a victim to retrieve his cell phone. T.D.W. testified at trial that he had a good faith belief that the victim possessed his cell phone, so he was going to take it back. At this point, it’s important to note that, technically speaking, a theft charge arises out of an ‘intent to deprive an owner of property’. So, how could a theft occur if the victim of the robbery wasn’t actually the ‘owner’ of the cell phone? The court in T.D.W. threw out T.D.W.’s conviction, reasoning that “a well-founded belief in one’s right to the allegedly stolen property constitutes a complete defense to a charge of theft”, as per a prior court ruling in Thomas v. State, 526 So. 2d 183 (Fla. 3d DCA 1988).

https://jgcrimlaw.com/blog/someone-stole-my-stuff-and-im-gon...

It's “your” the same way an Ikea shop is all “your” if you manage to get lock-in during the night[1]. Sure you have it, but if the authorities ever know that you have it you're screwed: you don't own it.

Btw, the IRS rule you're referring is just a hack to be able to at least charge people for tax fraud if the police cannot prove that you were involved in criminal activities. (Like how Al Capone got eventually caught for tax fraud).

[1]: https://7news.com.au/technology/tiktok/tiktok-video-of-logan...

Not a lawyer, but I think in a lot of jurisdictions the money still belongs to person it was stolen from, i.e., you only have possession, but don't own it - so not yours.

And yet you still have to pay taxes on it.

Cash is a bearer instrument, but your duties as a custodian of someone else’s cash is another matter.

If I leave a box with cash in your care and you steal it or are negligent, I can seek relief in the courts. If I win and you refuse to pay, the sheriff will seize assets and sell them to satisfy the order of the court.

Ok so then why even have cash? Why not just write IOU's and let the legal system decide? If I'm accepting cash there's no difference, as I don't know whether or not you legally own the cash.

Obviously, the answer is that cash is a good "first layer". The legal system is there to resolve disputes, not facilitate transactions.

Reversibility on a technical level and legal ownership are totally different things, it seems like many folks conflate them.

> The legal system is there to resolve disputes, not facilitate transactions.

Disputes without transactions don’t mean much. The legal system (at least the civil portion of it) exists solely to facilitate transactions, it’s just that normally those transactions are formalised in contracts.

Providing an adjudication service who decisions can be enforced with state violence, makes it much easier for people to have confidence in the value of contracts, and thus perform more complex transactions. The civil courts provide exactly this service, for the pure purposes of making transactions between private individuals easier and more enforceable without individuals resorting to vigilante justice.

Would having the contract defined in immutable, executable code also allow performing more complex transactions with confidence, in your opinion?

No. Immutable executable code can’t turn up at my house and take my possessions, nor can it easily validate my behaviour in meatspace.

Depending on where you are, the legal system might already block or complicate larger cash transactions, i.e., legal system already intervening on the transactions level.

Complicate how though? Can they backdoor the transfer to reverse it (or can another party do this for them)? Or only try to force the receiver to send the funds back with threats of punishment / physically take the funds?

My point is that those two things are fundamentally different.

You might need to establish ID, source of funds, etc., or beyond a certain limit cash transactions might just not be legal. Failure to comply might then lead to all sorts of unpleasantness.

Yup of course, what's your point though? I don't think this conflicts with what I'm saying.

My point was that the legal system is not just there for disputes but it also expresses things about what/how transactions should be done, i.e. it facilitates some and blocks others.

Oh got it, yeah I agree that the scope of the legal system is more than just resolving disputes, I was thinking of the legal system's role in finality specifically.

Yes, and the point the parent is making is that it isn't a very good one.

End of the day, the sovereign state possesses ultimate power. For awhile some people felt that Bitcoin, et al made them immune to the authority of the state.

The reality is, unless you’re in a particular situation, like a Russia-based criminal who kicks the big up the chain, you’re not out of reach of the law.

> the sovereign state possesses ultimate power

The sovereign state is a concept. It's not even a real thing and it has no physical power.

> immune to the authority of the state

They definitively are, comparatively. If you are moving across borders, it is much safer to hold $10m in crypto than cash. Actually, you'll need to be legit, pay a bribe or use violence to move that much cash through borders. But anyone can do it with crypto as long as there are no other tips on him.

I think you're undermining your argument by evaluating what is easier to smuggle. Sounds like the state has some power to justify that.

> End of the day, the sovereign state possesses ultimate power. For awhile some people felt that Bitcoin, et al made them immune to the authority of the state.

Well, one could argue that we, the people, want the sovereign state where there is some degree of social contract going on, to have that ultimate power.

Putting that power into a system that was designed by humans and almost by design can't be democratic and at best is meritocratic, is a very likely path to a Kafkaesque world.

A sovereign state possesses unlimited authority - but that doesn't automatically translate to power. It's one thing to pass a law that tried to regulate cryptocurrency transaction. Trying to actually enforce it is a whole different story.

It's hardly a banal point for certain uses of cash. It doesn't matter for me buying a 6-pack of beer at the corner store. But if, say, one of your employees has walked off with the day's cash, the reversibility of the transaction becomes extremely important to you.

Given that the relative advantage of cryptocurrencies is strongest for a variety of financial crime, I think the distinction matters even more. As the Bitfinex thieves are learning, cryptocurrency transactions are not as final as they would like.

But the transactions were final, just as it would be if your employee stole the day's cash and escaped somewhere you couldn't find them. Reversible would mean you could press a few buttons on the cash register and poof, the money's back in it and not the pocket of the thief.

Tracking down said thief and taking the bag of money back in this metaphor constitutes a new transaction. As is subpoenaing Dropbox and gaining access to the poorly encrypted list of private keys from these Bitfinex rapper/hackers.

I don't think that's true from the perspective of the employer with the stolen money. The employee took the cash. The employer just wants to hit undo on that. They don't see it as a new transaction, but the reversal of the old one.

Of course, this is all a bit arbitrary. So I don't think we'd have much to disagree if cryptocurrency proponents were open about that. But what we get is a lot of them talking about 100% irreversible transactions. That may be true in the technical jargon of a particular system, but is definitely not always true in the broader social context or in casual uses of the term.

I mean, Siebel took Autodesk for God knows how much and he’s doing pretty well.

P(seizure-of-assets) scales sharply up as one goes from none to some, and then sharply down as the number gets high.

What’s the story there, link?

First hit on Google is: https://techcrunch.com/2012/07/17/socialcam-autodesk-60-mill...

At the time that such an acquisition took place, it would have been heavily premised on FB feed injection, and if such a thing were to be realistic, I would have heard about it.

This is utter hearsay, unreliable watercooler baseball, but it’s not one person who said that he was in Thailand chilling for most of the vest.

I am still unsure how this pertains to seizure of assets? Seems like there was some startup spun out of justin.tv that then got acquired… was the spin out shady? The acquisition?

I’m in a tough spot because I threw that off in an offhand way, but I didn’t really think it through and now I’m in danger of presenting substantial, but nonetheless circumstantial and anecdotal evidence of a phenomenon that is real and harmful (which is good) but attaching it to a specific person (which is bad in general and mega bad for me personally).

But I kind of have to cough up now: the rumor mill, and it was exactly that, has made credible claims that Socialcam was a dead end that got pimped to Autodesk as their path towards social media relevance, including some influential angel back-scatter, and then the principles promptly fucked off to Thailand and rested their vest until they got big jobs at YC on the back of building…Socialcam.

Twitch is a name everyone knows, AMZN got their money’s worth. The other highly YC-connected justin.tv stuff? Yeah, not a big splash.

Socialcam, viddy, vine.. all precursors to TikTok.

Yes and no, but sure.

The failed justin.tv-spin-off folks don’t care though, they never had any real competition because people who don’t have a locked-in outcome can’t afford to pursue impoverished, transient markets.

I wouldn’t shed too many tears though: no one from that crowd is doing badly. Bad companies failing and burning up the cap table is for the plebs.

So a good reason to do YC? I am confused... Plenty of YC companies fail but part of being in YC is the network so you can start another company, work at another YC or work for YC. That basically de-risks startups immeasurably.

Being backed by YC is one of the best indicators that a startup will succeed. I’d advise almost anyone doing a startup to seek funding from YC.

I tend to get pretty cranky (as you can see) about the old-boys network that’s emerged around it, but that in no way diminishes the value to a founder of being in that network.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_asset_forfeiture

Still, that's not the point. Everyone knows that it's possible to physically move items from one place to another even if the legal owner of the item does not consent. Sometimes this is even legal, as in the case of civil asset forfeiture.

> Everyone knows that it's possible to physically move items from one place to another even if the legal owner of the item does not consent.

Maybe everybody knows it, but it certainly is worth reiterating. I find the notion of transaction finality as a spectrum very useful.

I don't think it's worth reiterating, at least not in the context of attempting to argue that "finality does not exist in payments," because it involves using a contrived definition of "finality" that no is ever using when they consider whether finality exists in payments.

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