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Comment by spupe | Hacker News Reader

They can seize the gold only if they know where it is. And to convert crypto back into Canadian dollars, you will need to go through the "legacy" banking system at any substantial amount, where it can be flagged with standard tools and you would be arrested.

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>And to convert crypto back into Canadian dollars

the ultimate goal is to never convert back

They can also criminalize accepting Bitcoin for payment for goods, in which case you would have no choice but to convert back to dollars (and taxes will likely always be paid in dollars anyway)

And then there would be a black market, immediately. Prohibition tends to be exceptionally violent. The point being: using a decentralized currency makes authoritarianism harder. This is not exactly a radical idea: foreign currencies have very often been banned from use in dictatorships. Why people kick back on "internet money" being a tool to use against abusive governments is strange: It's more or less it's only real feature, and the feature that makes it's enormous computational cost worthwhile.

I'm aware this is a wildly radical set of statements, and I'm not a bitcoin-carrying-anarchist, but you can't really deny that this is the real application of "internet money", and thus the original point of the article stands.

Regular people in dictatorships aren't hiding money in cryptocurrency, because they don't have money to stash away, usually. The rich in those societies may be, and they're likely rich through being affiliated with the dictator.

You aren't helping liberate the poor and desperate. You're helping oligarchs hide their money from domestic or international seizure after the dictator falls, and a new government steps in.

I don't follow the argument: the oligarchs aren't using crypto, so using crypto helps oligarchs?

If the average person, wealthy or affiliated or not, has a way of avoiding the mandated use of a fiat currency, and that pressure creates an upper and lower bound for how badly the leaders of their country can manipulate the currency supply, yes I believe that helps the poor and desperate. If part of liberty is ownership, then yes, it even helps liberate them too.

Black market? I thought Bitcoin is a "store of value" for investors? Those investors want legitimacy so grandmas buy Bitcoin.

Not to start a debate, but my suggestion is to ignore anyone who phrases a sentence such that value can exist inside of objects. Nothing is a store of value, because value doesn't appear to exist - it's like color - it's an interpretation of available information.

Bitcoin is a currency that is hard to stop. That makes it a tool to antagonize authoritarians with.

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