Comment by Barrera | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Barrera | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to see Bitcoin's value proposition when you live a life of financial privilege. Bitcoin's value proposition is this: censorship-resistant money. If you don't care about being censored, you won't see the value proposition. If civil asset forfeiture seems like no big deal, then Bitcoin will seem dumb. If routing literally every payment you make through a surveillance apparatus seems fine then Bitcoin makes no sense. If weaponization of your local currency to fight those who disagree with the regime in power seems legit, Bitcoin is just a scam.

Here's the problem: you give a government an inch and they'll take a foot. Give them a foot and they'll take a yard.

The financial weaponization and surveillance policies put in place by western "democracies" are never, ever going away. They will only be expanded. Today they knock on the door of the crackpot. Tomorrow it could be your door they're knocking on. It's easy to stay blind to this simple fact until it's far too late to respond.

With most forms of crypto the government can look at the ledger. Frequently the US has success at tracking down and seizing Bitcoin and other forms of crypto.

Since the ledger is public you can replace your elected and somewhat accountable 'government' with

* North Korea, Iran, ...

* Scientology or Jeffery Epstein's lawyers (if you are a victim looking for justice)

* the Mafia, Yakuza, Triad, ...

* Greenpeace, ACT UP, Proud Boys, ...

really anybody who wants to make your life hell. So going to crypto is going from the frying pan to the fire.

The key is that they can look at the ledger, but not alter the ledger. But also privacy improvements to the bitcoin protocol, privacy focused transactions like coinjoins, and payments on the lightning network help hide that even more.

> The key is that they can look at the ledger, but not alter the ledger.

This is only true if you think governments are not capable of pulling off a 51% attack. It would absolutely be feasible for a few of the world powers to pull it off, if not a single world power.

Sure for smaller proof of work coins, and maybe today. It would require a massive amount of money, energy, coordination, and time - and it's getting harder to do as the total hashpower grows every day.

But who needs that?

If "they" can track you down "they" can arrest you, kill you, torture you, extort you, ...

There are ways to avoid your transactions being tracked. Coinjoin transactions, purchasing a miner for non-kyc bitcoin, payments on the lightning network, etc

Also, they can do all of those things, but you can setup your private keys in a way that your family will still have access to the bitcoin even if you are killed

"Lightning" protocol and other sidechains don't deliver on their promises as well as the base bitcoin protocol.

"Help" with privacy isn't enough, you need something that is bulletproof and either resistant to you screwing up the OPSEC or otherwise you have to get OPSEC right all the time.

Using the same mixer as terrorists could get you charged under anti-terrorism laws.

Before you use one I'd ask you to ask yourself if you want to be complicit in large-scale tax evasion, international sex trafficking and all sorts of awful things that make the mixer more than a game where you can imagine you're important because you're a spy or something.

Theoretically I can stand up a mining operation in my apartment. That means that the 51% attack (as long as it can be detected) can be thwarted by folks at the grass roots level (as long as they actually care). Am I wrong about this?

You are practically wrong about this - the number of people who need to notice and attempt to a 51% attack is enormous ... and not possible to do after the fact

Before the fact? Sure - but then the 51% issue doesn't happen, and you get to precrime

They can look at the ledger, and show up to your house, take ownership of your house and put you in jail.

Why look at the ledger?

They can show up to your house and shoot you.

Censorship-resistance is not an all-or-nothing game, but a gradual refinement.

If you want something where they can't just look at the ledger, look at Zcash:

https://z.cash/technology/

There are countries with totalitarian governments where you can still make private transactions, as long as you don't get too loud about it. And there are countries where any financial transaction will put your family in labor camp for three generations. Some fancy bits on the internet won't help anyone in a rut like that. Doesn't make them useless.

Everyone can look at the ledger. This is of course the whole point. But it means nothing by itself. Privacy is eroded by linking ledger pseudonyms with other identities. It's especially bad when a record of that link is made in a database. This is something that users do for various reasons, but it's not required.

>routing literally every payment you make through a surveillance apparatus

This is pretty much exactly what BTC is too and in some senses is way worse, people only need to find a way to associate wallet addresses with identity and all your financials are open to them.

There are of course options that truly do solve the censorship issue, like Monero.

True, privacy in Bitcoin takes diligence. But that association between pseudonyms and identities is not part of Bitcoin but rather some of the things that happen around Bitcoin. Understanding the risks is key. I'm not saying it's easy, just that it's possible to maintain far better privacy than with credit card payments.

There isn't a lot of practical evidence that the rhetoric of bitcoin's value proposition is actually manifest.

What kind of evidence would convince you?

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