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Comment by _mhr_ | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean by uncensorable? What does censorship have to do with sanctions hurting innocent economic participants?

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if you sanction Iran, limiting their fruit sellers, you have to have means to track the trades in order to enforce those sanctions - lightening network is effectively untraceable at the moment (and tools built on top of bitcoin can make tracing payments provably impossible) which means the sanctions can't be easily enforced - no country is going to spend resources proving their businesses aren't doing fruit trades with sanctioned countries, so if you can't trace the money, you're going to have an incredibly hard time enforcing sanctions - which I would suggest means Iranian fruit sellers aren't going to be nearly as limited in their trade. Iran certainly isn't going to limit them and the sanctioning country (US in this example) isn't going to have the resources to audit every single import to every other country.

The physical fruits and nuts still have to be smuggled out of Iran and into a country supporting the sanctions for this to make sense. And the physical smuggling seems way more difficult than figuring out the payments.

They don't have to be smuggled out of Iran - Iran explicitly wants to enable that trade. Who inside of Iran are they smuggling the fruits away from?

They have to be smuggled INTO another country. One that has applied sanctions and doesn’t want Iran’s fruits and nuts. Violating import laws especially for agricultural products is a big deal.

no country _wants_ to reduce trade - they simply accept that sanctions are necessary. Reducing trade necessarily hurts both countries, and there aren't likely to be any functioning developed countries that want to act against their own interests. As such, it's not at all hard to imagine the receivers having a hard time enforcing sanctions. After all, with all the problems a country has - why would they dedicate time and resources to purposefully hurt their own?

If the countries wanted to accept the fruits and nuts, they wouldn’t need bitcoin for payments. They would do the usual trade processes. They have outlawed imports from Iran and bitcoin doesn’t change the fact that circumventing agricultural import laws is a massive crime.

incorrect, those imports paid in fiat are traceable - that's how we enforce sanctions today - we fine companies like banks for violating sanctions all the time - you know how they're caught? Financial audits, every time.

Companies use proxy countries to bypass sanctions all the time. You know how they're caught? Financial audits.

> change the fact that circumventing agricultural import laws is a massive crime

I'm not sure how people so easily forget that it was a massive crime to protect jews from being murdered. That same thing still happens today with various minority groups around the world.

If you pay attention to non-developed world problems, you become painfully aware that bypassing laws that are a "massive crime" is extremely important for solving some of the worst problems in humanity today.

I don't think it's as hard as you think to track ships. They're all tracked already

Government will adapt and just ban shipping vessels from visiting sanctioned countries, or create a vast make work agency to inspect cargo on ships that visited sanctioned countries.

and who is going to track those ships? The sanctioning country doesn't have the jurisdiction and likely doesn't have the resources to logistically stop it. The countries benefiting from the trade (both sanctioned and allied nations) have every incentive to allow the trade to happen if it can happen without detection - so who is going to stop it?

What has stopped the fruit sellers from using bitcoin to avoid sanctions for the past five years?

It hasn't stopped them or anyone else, people have been using bitcoin to bypass censorship for years.

Then why are they still "suffering immensely" if they can already use bitcoin to bypass the sanctions?

There are people bypassing sanctions with bitcoin that aren't suffering as much because of it.

As for why everyone isn't using bitcoin to bypass? Good question.

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