Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

matheusmoreira

> Creating a currency

Shouldn't be illegal.

> exchanging it for dollars

Shouldn't be illegal.

> You give banknotes to someone in exchange for a token which you don’t know how it was obtained.

It doesn't matter how it was obtained.

> In most cases, it is facilitating drug exchange and hitmen

Oh... Just like USD then.

Why don't you go after them for those crimes? Without coopting us into your warrantless global surveillance network?

> unless one can prove where a Bitcoin comes from

That it is even possible to prove that is actually a failure of bitcoin's design. Thankfully Monero fixed it. Money should be fungible. There should be no dirty/clean bit attached to coins.

View on HN

There's a huge difference between physically transporting a large amount of cash and disposing of it usefully without being detected versus electronically moving it around the world and exchanging it for fiat currency entirely anonymously.

Here's a clue: one of those is hard to do and massively increases your risk of being caught, and the other actually enables further criminal activity which would not otherwise be easily possible.

So no, not just like USD.

And yet every criminal out there seems to be using USD. Funny how that works. Maybe we should ban USD too.

Well, if you want to actually spend your ill gotten gains, you pretty much need it in fiat currency. I don't see the point you are making.

The original purpose of cryptocurrency was to replace fiat by getting everyone to use it for their transactions. People would be pricing things in bitcoin or monero instead of USD.

Well, yeah, that was the original idea. Didn't work out like that though.

Yes. That's the point. The fact it didn't work out like that, and turned into stonks line go up instead, is the tragedy of cryptocurrency.

> > Creating a currency

> Shouldn't be illegal.

This is exactly where the bullshit should stop. Creating currencies should be the sole privilege of sovereign governments.

Bullshit? It's the government currencies that are bullshit. You're replying to someone who lives in a country that actually went through several currencies. They became so worthless they had to be replaced. If you search "Brazil" here on HN you'll find the top post is about how "fake money" saved my country. They essentially tricked everyone into believing this time was going to be different. I'm sorry but I don't believe these people for a second. And neither should you or anyone else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com