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Comment by h2odragon | Hacker News Reader

The Canadian Gubmint is issuing orders about seizing crypto assets too.

We need more economic freedom; "cryptocurrencies" are not suddenly a panacea to that end. They're still the scam riddled "but this is stupid at its very base" pyramid schemes they were all along.

See the precedent set by Emperor Norton; community currencies and other alternates can work too. What's needed is a government that admits limits to its powers to interfere with its citizens ability to transact. There's no technical means to make a government live up to that promise... Short of explosives.

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> The Canadian Gubmint is issuing orders about seizing crypto assets too.

Sure, but the entire point is that they can't.

If you manage your own private keys, it is significantly harder for the canadian government to seize your assets compared to the gov telling your bank to freeze your account.

Crypto people need to work on UX though, so that you don't need to be technically savvy to do so.

>> Sure, but the entire point is that they can't.

>> If you manage your own private keys, it is significantly harder for the canadian government to seize your assets compared to the gov telling your bank to freeze your account.

If they want your keys badly enough, they will get them:

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/security.png

There is a big and meaningful difference between being able to freeze bank accounts at scale without violence and only with the cooperation of a centralized finance institution, versus having to physically torture each account owner to get what they want one by one. A government would have to be substantially more evil and use vastly more resources to do the later. And there is a second order chilling effect in the former, where even if a government does not seize asserts, the threat of it will make citizens think about their words.

If the crypto is in the users wallet (i.e. not on some crypto exchange) the canadian government cannot seize it without asking the user to sign a transaction transferring them the crypto.

We are 13 years on from bitcoins inception, and we are on a tech board, how this is still not clear to people boggles me.

How many crypto "owners" don't have a wallet? What do those who do have one do when they get told "cough up the keys or go to jail"? "Crypto" is not some magic "laws don't apply" wand.

"I had a boating accident" is a pretty common response.

> cough up the keys or go to jail"

There is literally a meme about this my man. It’s called I lost my wallet in a boating accident lol.

Also, that’s why Bitcoin is different than “crypto”. The first thing you hear when you buy Bitcoin, “not your keys, not your coins”.

The point is not to eradicate the law, the point is to make it difficult to freeze 1000 people accounts than pushing a button. It will make people think about other solutions than stealing people money.

First of all prove I have crypto

Many of them will if the calculus changes and they think the assets may be seized at any moment. Or, we will see the rise of custodians based in countries that won't respect requests from US et al to freeze accounts.

People mostly don't bother with any of this right now because it hasn't been a real threat.

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