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Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

People who are anti-crypto are expressing the privilege that comes when you assume transactions you want to do will never be illegal. Crypto and trustless systems like DeFi are essential technologies to help in protecting the freedom to transact in the face of authoritarian regimes or other similar threats.

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Absolutely agreed. However, the parent comment is still not wrong.

Crypto _has_ legit use cases (like you mentioned) and I hope it stays. But those use cases will never justify billions of dollars and this much resource, talent and energy poured to it (Usually to the benefit of a few, while costing clueless people their money)

Crypto could've been Bitcoin/Eth with a much smaller valuation and a healthy community and I'm sure most "anti crypto" people would've not been "anti crypto". It didn't have to be this big to have people against it. It could've been a technology we use like Venmo or IMAP. Something that solves some use cases.

A vast amount of money and effort goes into creating products that are only accessible to people in the US. I’d say the rest of the world is due a more than a few billion dollars worth of investment into financial infrastructure.

Not disputing that there’s a lot of scams and shady operators, but that kind of goes with the territory of subversive technology.

> those use cases will never justify billions of dollars and this much resource, talent and energy poured to it

I don't remember the source tweet anymore, but a lot of the interest in crypto from software engineers comes from the belief that most challenges that can be solved with technology have become political problems, and that there's a "why even bother?" mentality because the bureaucrats have made it unappealing to press forward.

I think this is a fair perspective but it does ignore the fact that if/when you have Internet money that works, it inductively leads to many additional consequences that inevitably will be attempted, such as building a parallel financial system on top of it. I think these are all in-flight and do tie back to the original thesis, but time will tell what sticks. I will say FTX is largely unrelated to the tech track of crypto, it’s just an example of an unregulated bank gambling with customer funds. Centralized exchanges for crypto certainly should be subject to the same regulatory regime as banks, especially as people begin to hold more and more crypto in their portfolios.

Is anyone operating under authoritarian regimes easier with blockchain now?

Compared or cash or anything else?

This seems like a scenario where there are other issues and blockchain isn’t really solving anything for you…

And if you get caught it’s all on the chain..

> And if you get caught it’s all on the chain..

I'd imagine in those circumstances, once you are caught you are in trouble regardless of the medium of exchange once the authorities note you are doing something. Up to that point, something like Monero [0] probably mitigates the risk, they have some insanely good obfuscation happening to make it hard to figure out who is trading with whom.

[0] https://www.getmonero.org/resources/about/

You could get caught because the other guy you paid got caught.

That'd probably happen with cash too though, it my thinking.

If you need to leave your country quickly, perhaps because you are being conscripted into a war that you don’t want to die in, are you going to pack your bag full of cash on your way out? It will be confiscated.

You going to pay the border guard off with something that gets recorded on a ledger?

Are people actually doing this? Finding it easier to flee with crypto?

Criminals extensively using crypto proves that it is the case - under authoritarian regimes criminals are acting with virtue. Obviously things like Tornado Cash facilitate ways to obfuscate chain state, but further things like ZKPs will continue to bolster the role of crypto for transacting globally with low relative risk when under surveillance or police states.

This reminds me of the rhetoric used by people who think TOR is a vital tool for valiant and heroic freedom fighters in the clutching claws of despotic dictators.

When in reality it's only used to purchase benzos and child pornography and its use it easily detectable by authoritarian regimes that control the nation's internet infrastructure.

Any authoritarian regime that will ban transactions will also ban crypto.

Detecting its use is as easy as detecting TOR usage.

Venezuela didn’t ban crypto.

The world is not split into black and white, good democracies and bad repressive countries. Most countries are a shade of gray.

For instance, my country (UK) is not usually included in lists of authoritarian countries, but still all internet activity is logged and available to the authorities. Even for minor administrative disputes.

Tor is a useful tech and bad users, no matter their number, do not diminish that.

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