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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

1. Are all crimes, right? Banks will take your consumer money (provider management does get more complicated) for gambling and porn these days. The stuff you can't get past them is almost exclusively criminal. If you don't like the fact that the government made something illegal, why are you blaming money? Also: crimes don't stop being crimes just because you paid in BTC, and those transactions aren't as anonymous as you think.

2. That part is true, largely. You do have to pay a (very large!) fee for the transaction, but it's not to anyone in particular and they don't know any more than the rest of us do about what you're paying for (which, again, is not completely anonymous!).

3. This part is laughably wrong. Even now, post-crash, transaction fees are measured in multiple dollars per. During the boom, it was routine to see entities paying more than $100 to get a transaction to post.

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1. From memory one was payment to real-debrid and another my VPS provider. The blocks seem arbitrary, sometimes payment would go through other times not. In any case after CC and Paypal failed the BTC option just worked.

3. The exchange rates are rarely market rates with most platforms. I think Mastercard/VISA is as good as it gets when exchanging. With crypto the downside is wait times, if you don't want to pay a high fee you don't have to.

> Are all crimes, right? Banks will take your consumer money (provider management does get more complicated) for gambling and porn these days

Not necessarily. For example, PayPal has recently introduced "acceptable use policy" where they can freeze your account without you violating the law. Banks also have done the same for being "racist", "sexist", "anti-vaxx" etc. All of those things are perfectly legal in the US. So your assertion that only illegal activities require use of crypto is false.

And that's before we get to the fact that just because something is "illegal" doesn't mean it's good to have this banned. Pretty sure the ongoing Iranian protests are illegal.

> just because something is "illegal" doesn't mean it's good to have this banned

No, but it means that the question has nothing to do with money. Using BTC to launder or evade tracking for a transaction that is illegal is simply committing another crime. If you want to be free of prosecution, talk to your government, don't just cheat and figure it's OK because it's crypto. That's how you end up in jail.

First of all, the fact that you completely ignored the first point about perfectly legal "racist", "sexist", "anti-vaxx" behavior being enough to get you banned from PayPal/banks means you accept that there are valid LEGAL use cases of crypto.

As for your suggestion to "talk to your government", yeah I'm sure that will go down well with the Iranian regime trying to crack down on anti-hijab protestors.

Can you maybe cite the folks who are using crypto out of necessity instead of banking with money? Someone getting PayPal miffed at them isn't remotely the same thing as "can't use money", and I think you know that.

What you're doing is extrapolating from "some people sometimes have trouble with a bank" (true) to "the only way to evade oppressive banking censorship is crypto" (bananas).

Or rather, the second frame is true, for a certain subset of transactions that happen to be illegal.

I don't have examples of people getting banned by banks/PayPal for legal activities using crypto, no. But that doesn't mean crypto-based solutions can't fill that void in the future. Note that I never claimed crypto is the "only way" to solve this issue. But, it's a promising alternative. Any centralized solution for these use-cases are tricky because they're niche and don't probably have the necessary scale. Not to mention, any centralized solution is always carries censorship risks. If you have a decentralized, usable, non-crypto alternatives for these cases, I'm open ears.

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