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Comment by ddevault | Hacker News Reader

It's subjective. For us, it's a question of social impact. Sure, torrenting copyrighted material is illegal, but what's the actual social consequence of it? Little to none. Bittorrent also has a wealth of legitimate use-cases. For cryptocurrency, this is not the case: the social impact is grave, and there are few to no legitimate use-cases for it.

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It is, indeed, a subjective thing. I personally have given up on cryptocurrency, but I seem to recall (and the absolute worthless rag called Reuters seems to corroborate: https://www.reuters.com/technology/venezuelas-economy-regres...) that Venezuelans found a recourse in crypto after the Venezuelan economy imploded. However that is just one data point, and the utter lack of any real wins aside from that would seem to agree with your statement that there are few legitimate use-cases.

No, Venezuelians were forced into cryptocurrency by a completely incompetent leader that thought that making your country based solely around gas was a sensible idea, and despite buying millions upon millions in various cryptocurrencies, has lost over 50% of their investment.

The bolivar is still hyperinflated, the Petro is still useless.

I think you're conflating Venezuela with El Salvador?

To take an extreme example, it’s probably true that CSAM has some value (there’s people willing to pay for it) and you could in theory traffic in it for “good reasons” but for most it would be repulsive.

Would they choose to die rather than do it? Hopefully nobody would be put to the test.

That something found a good use doesn’t mean it’s a good (or bad) thing. Society is all about trying to navigate the trade offs.

> it’s probably true that CSAM has some value

I think you're conflating financial value and social value (CSAM may have some financial value, but highly negative social value). I really struggle to see how you could (even theoretically) traffic CSAM for "good reasons".

I find it ironic that you're moving from the US to reduce impact of state overreach (compliance), yet want to overimpose on your users.

We're moving from the US for many reasons; I don't think we ever mentioned reducing the impact of state overreach.

In many minds Europe is the epitomy of state overreach, the home of pro-consumer anti-business regulation. The truth is of course more nuanced, but this appears to be a move consistent with an owner who believes in consumer protection regulation.

Cryptocurrency developers are free to exercise the same rights and move their projects to somewhere else. But I agree it's very stupid. I paid for a year of sourcehut for my account that I never used just to help the project. I'll just delete it at this point.

If you view compliance as overreach then I find it odd you think the EU has less of it. Strong consumer laws such as GRPC are in the EU and not in the US. Even in terms of corporate finance there's a reason everyone like Delaware corporations and it's not due to them wanting more compliance. The US has other things that could be seen as overreach but compliance is usually not one that people think of.

I appreciate you taking a stance like this.

>The social impact is grave

It also has a positive impact.

To make just one example, millions of people make use of cryptocurrencies for remittances to send money back home. By using cryptocurrencies they can circumvent the obnoxious fees and delays they would get if they use traditional payment services.

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