Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

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> Apart from magic internet money, I cannot figure out any other way in which to "make myself heard".

Your way of "making yourself heard" is to trade your real dollars for digital dollars?

The thing about cryptocurrencies is that you don't need to invest in them to use them as needed. Sure, you could argue that maybe at some future point the governments could possibly all band together and shut down every on-ramp to cryptocurrency, but that's extremely unlikely to happen universally across the globe. As long as some country, somewhere, allows cryptocurrency purchases then there will be a way to use them.

The narrative that you have to invest in cryptocurrency to stick it to the government is really just consumerism being applied liberally by people who want the price of their crypto to go up.

> you don't need to invest in them to use them as needed

"As needed" is an interesting phrase. I'd argue that what we need from cryptocurrency is for it to move past the current phase where the only consensus it bothers with is account balances.

We need consensus about things that will help us collectively act to keep powerful entities like governments in check. As it stands, they're very good at dividing us against one another.

If you end up making some fiat along the way, that's fine, but the return on an investment in crypto is a world where the powerful are well-behaved because they're scared that the rest of us will turn our backs on the abstractions that give them power.

As it stands, that's not a credible threat, so it's reasonable to make investments that'll take things in the direction (which is, sadly, not the effect of most crypto investing).

If you re-frame money as essentially a form of speech then 'making yourself heard' makes sense. The medium becomes the message. DeFi as the ideal, not top-down government to control the money supply with sketchy all-seeing-eye masonic symbols on the banknotes.

DeFI cannot coexist with either OFAC or AML in the picture.

Those are the fundamental roots of money as a top-down control mechanism. Those functions alone are responsible for making the finance sector a de-facto extension of the United States Government and an effective extension of Law Enforcement.

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