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Comment by etherael | Hacker News Reader

Giving North Korean citizens access to an economy outside their locked down one where they can engage in trade may well be the exact opposite of collaborating with the North Korean regime. This could easily be the most practical and realistic way to destroy North Korean control over its economy.

If those citizens are no longer beholden to the regime for their economic livelihood and that encourages internal organisation as well as more people seeing they have other options, sooner or later that's going to have a corrosive effect on state control of the economic affairs of North Korean citizens.

Frankly the US should be all over encouraging this activity, but given how stupid they have been for all modern history I can't say I'm surprised they're not.

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I don't think this rationale holds up to the least bit of scrutiny. How would a DPRK citizen hold or transact with cryptocurrency? On their heavily locked down and monitored computer devices on the heavily locked down and monitored national network?

How many times do we have to try this "stronger economic ties will encourage freedom/peace/democracy" theory before we accept that it only serves to enrich those who are already wealthy and doesn't do a thing to preserve peace. It perhaps even does the opposite: becomes a tool of coercion the bad actor can use to manipulate the free economies with which they trade. The free markets get hooked on the cheap $thing provided by the authoritarian government and then we're stuck. Our consumers are fat and happy with the cheap $thing so our politicians look the other way as the evil regime does more and more overtly evil things. Trade makes us more tolerant of the authoritarians' bad behavior. It doesn't encourage the authoritarians to behave better. See, e.g., Russia's sale of natural gas to Europe, China's sale of labor/consumer products to the West, KSA's sale of petrol to the States.

Time and again we do business with evil regimes and pretend it might result in some good. It doesn't. It won't. Let's not keep repeating the same failed experiment.

I didn't claim anything about stronger economic ties between the organisational units of the States in question. I was making the exact opposite claim, that you weaken a closed state proportional to the degree of its closure by using countereconomics to erode the control it can directly exert upon its citizenry.

I absolutely agree with you that trade with dystopian hellholes that provide economic resources the rulers of those dystopian hellholes can use to continue with their strategies is counter-productive and that all trade of that kind should to the maximum degree possible, be stopped.

The kind of trade however that is enabled by peer to peer participants all over the world being directly able to trade with each other for goods and services to the extent the rulers of those dystopian hellholes cannot profit from is another thing entirely, and that is the kind of trade that blockchains can enable. That black market trade sets up competitive and progressively independent organisational units not beholden to the dystopian rulers they would otherwise be and directly compromises their economic power.

Ask a soldier in the Venezuelan army what he thinks of the regime, and then ask a Venezuelan software engineer with the skills and experience in demand that would enable him to work remotely for dozens of well paid jobs transacting in crypto all over the world the same question. I guarantee the responses you get will illustrate my point very clearly.

Vietnam is certainly a lot more relaxed than it used to be. That coincides with the world deciding to do business with them.

So far, the track record of “cut off all interactions with the country until they instate the government we want” doesn’t have a good track record. Iran, Cuba, and North Korea are still doing the same thing they were doing 50 years ago. Thinking another 50 years will change things is insanity. Let’s stop continuing this obviously failed experiment.

Sanctions are potentially effective in the short term. Once they reach the scale of entire human lifespans, you’re just making the people suffer for your own moral superiority.

This is the Merkel-Steinmeier system that was applied to Russia. Bring Russia into the fold economically. Ignore its bad actions. Give it access to money, technology, etc. So that it will become economically dependent with us and then it won't want to attack anyone. Surely as Russians become more economically able they will fight against Putin's brutal reign. Well, exactly the opposite happened.

Look at Ukraine today. People are fighting for their lives while Russians slaughter women and children and throw their dead bodies into wells. That's what the Merkel-Steinmeier approach gives you.

Giving a regime like this money makes the regime more powerful, not less.

> Frankly the US should be all over encouraging this activity, but given how stupid they have been for all modern history I can't say I'm surprised they're not.

The US had been warning Germany to stop its dependence on Russian gas for a decade.

The idea that we should trade with these kinds of regimes is very clearly refuted at this point.

As I clarified above, I am not promoting state to state white market economic activity. I am promoting peer to peer countereconomic black market activity which cripples the control and power of the closed economy with the express goal of destroying the control and parasitism enabled by the closed economy.

"Peer to peer" is a superset of "state to state". There is no technology which will allow a North Korean citizen to sidestep their government's parasitic internal economy without also allowing the North Korean government to sidestep international sanctions.

Which is another way of saying that trade that might be either can't even be effectively policed by the dystopian state if they want to use it for evading sanctions to the extent they're able without simultaneously shooting themselves in the foot.

If they can't police it effectively all the more reason for more people to do it.

You can't look at the failure of the Merkel-Steinmeier in isolation and say "we tried that".

At the same time the US encircled Russia with bases, weapons and nukes. At the same time the US bombed Russian allied states.

North Korean citizens don't have internet access.

Cryptocurrencies have no way to unilaterally accomplish that.

Bitcoin can’t stop anyone from knocking down your door and taking your belongings. It doesn’t work without access to communication technology. It doesn’t do anything to circumvent barriers to trade in the physical world. Trade requires two transfers. And, you can’t eat a bitcoin.

The only people in NK who have the ability to use bitcoin in trade are the political elite.

You can store crypto in your head, and you can certainly use it to put together funds which would be helpful to escape.

I'd really like to hear how you think that would physically take place.

If you had the ability to relatively risk free assist an NK defector and knew doing so would give you access to large economic reward, why would you choose not to?

How would you send someone in NK cryptocurrency? And if you could, how would they use it to escape?

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