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Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

This is a super common argument strategy "on the internet" (but also at work with people who are too annoying for their own good, including myself). Just stripping away context until suddenly the thing you're saying is fine. People throwing out metaphors and similes as if shuffling around numbers on a hard drive and throwing pieces of metal and paper into a jar are the same thing.

And nobody is really immune to this line of thinking! There are people who scoff at "mixing cash into the jar is not illegal" but will state that "math can't be made illegal" or "you can't copyright numbers". I'm definitely not immune to it.

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The act of mixing or laundering isn't per se illegal. The issue is government couldn't track illegal activities generated funds used in that mixing. It is the same with encryption, it isnt wrong when you encrypt but government will hunt you down if you export that tech to others. They will also hunt you down if you dont modify you encryption tech to their liking quietly. Even court sided with government in every countries. If you mixing the money in jar with a bunch of crook, and refuse to cooperate with government, they will hunt you down. So the issue isnt really they can't do the mixing. They didnt want to cooperate with government. Hence what we see now is just normal government hunting. Macfee and Bobby Fischer had gone thru this and paid dearly for not cooperating with government - legal or not.

> The act of mixing or laundering isn't per se illegal

Mixing maybe not, but money laundering is, per se, illegal.

"And nobody is immune to this line of thinking!"

In some workplaces this "line of thinking" does not even amount to "thinking" let alone legitimate argument.

What is money-laundering. Is it "mixing cash in a jar".

In a February 2019 chat, one compliance employee at Binance wrote that the company needed a banner that said, "Is washing drug money too hard these days? Come to Binance. We got cake for you."

The reality is laws and civil order are an illusion, there’s what gets men with guns sent to your house and what does not.

What's wrong with "math can't be made illegal"? I think the context for this argument (that I've heard most often) is around e2e encryption, and in that context I agree with it, both from an enforceability and a moral perspective.

Every so often I read a HN comment that is salient and useful. It changes how I think about an argument and I occasionally use the HN comment as a basis for an argument in real life.

This HN comment is one such comment.

"can't" in that context is itself a metaphor for "you should not because of the obvious consequences".

Yeah there's definitely a deeper argument there, but I think it still falls into a similar category of ignoring context in many cases.

The "can't" variants often imply that it would cross the Rubicon on some issue. My contention is that usually, the supposed Rubibon has already been crossed ages (often centuries!) ago.

Of course "crossing the Rubicon" itself is a social construct, so at least those arguments can warp reality enough to become self-fulfilling. If everyone is convinced that something is impossible, it becomes very hard to argue that doing it is reasonable.

EDIT: and to be clear, I am not looking to litigate the illegal number issue. I've heard the arguments, this isn't a question of ignorance. It's a question of having different base axioms. I reserve my right to be extremely wrong on this issue to prove a point in an internet discussion

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