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Comment by IKantRead | Hacker News Reader

The old crypto chants were that crypto would lead us away from the ills of traditional markets/finance.

Glad to see that it's been watered down to "just as bad as" arguments.

I’ll admit it has been deeply entertaining watching the crypto community speed-run 200 years of “finding out the hard way why modern financial regulations exist” and “how to recognize a blisteringly obvious ponzi scheme” in the span of 15 years.

I say this as someone who got his first 0.05 btc for signing up for a newsletter in 2009 or 2010.

0.05? You probably misremember the amount. For reference, in 2010 the Bitcoin faucet gave away 5 BTC just for visiting a web page. A decent incentive for subscribing to a newsletter, more involved than visiting a web page, would have to have been higher than 5 BTC.

In about the same time frame someone offered me 16,000 BTC for a mediocre graphics card I put on a listing. (I turned it down.)

Someone has to post it: that'd be worth $736,592,000 today if you'd kept it all.

I must be misremembering the year then! It was 0.05 because I thought it was 5 then found the old hard drive last year and managed to recover it from an ancient bitcoin client. I don’t remember the details but I had to let it sync (downloading data?) for days before I could make a transaction to an exchange and sell.

What "chants" are you referring to specifically re differences in markets? AFAIK it has always been pushed as a decentralized alternative to sending money, but that has little bearing on the way the traded price changes?

Greed will, uhhhhh, find a way.

When was that the chant? They said more financial inclusiveness and self sovereignty. There are some with code is law and more cypherpunk ideals that is true. The early internet and open source movement had similar movements and these people still exist trying to improve society. Once things become mainstream the majority of focus becomes business and what products/services it can provide. The same companies in this space focused on business want clear regulation not lack of it.

Tomorrow your bank could cut you off from your own money because you protested the government[1], and what could you possibly do?

Having the freedom to truly own your own money and investments is valuable in and of itself, no matter how much crypto "devolves" towards traditional finance in other regards.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/world/americas/canada-pro...

Instead, you can lose access to your money just because you forgot your secret key.

But one of those things has the responsibility placed up on you.

The other, not so much.

Plenty of downsides to crypto no doubt, but I'm not sure "personal responsibility" is one of them.

Or Worse, coinbase decided you are no longer worth their time. Wait, I thought this was supposed to be decentralized.

Yes, like you can lose your treasure by forgetting where you buried it. Or you can lose your silver when an accidental fire melts your palace into slag. Or you can lose your wheat harvest to mold! Self-storage is the default way of holding wealth, not a new one. And it's a tradeoff that people will always choose to make as long as personal wealth exists.

Among the innumerable problems with cryptocurrency, this is not one of them.

Honestly, the first thing I'd do is hope that they forgot that I make house and car payments though them and that they forgot how much damage they could do to my professional life just by intentionally sabotaging my credit. Crypto doesn't provide any realistic protection to me from their whims should they become bad actors.

Apart from some edge cases, Western democracies have quite solid property rights upheld also by the judicial system. But yes if you’re in Russia or China then this argument is moot. They have much less property rights. However, Bitcoin is also not a solution because there is no point in owning Bitcoin if you fell trice out of a Russian window or are sentenced to a labour camp or to the death penalty in China for "fraudulus activities“. Difficult to spend your Bitcoin in both cases.

I certainly wouldn't call being Canadian an "edge case."

Protesting ought to be something you can do in any Western democracy without fear of losing access to your accounts.

I would hope that the judicial system fixes the government intervention. I haven’t heard of similar cases in Canada or other liberal democracies.

Being a trucker in Canada is a edge case. Also being a human interacting with police in the US.

Did you mean intellectual property? You draw Mickey a year ago and a FBI helicopter would soon be overhead to kill your dog and take any cash they find in your wallet.

They were violating the law, and using the funds in the accounts to further the law breaking.

They call it civil disobedience. People seem to forget part of civil disobedience is going to jail and paying a fine. That’s always been the deal.

Civil disobedience carrying a negative of some kind for the protester is a significant part of my respect for people doing it.

If it was entirely painless, it would have a lot less effect I think.

Unbanking someone isn't the same as charging them a fine.

> People seem to forget part of civil disobedience is going to jail and paying a fine.

That's not even vaguely what happened here and it's well beyond arguing in bad faith to attempt to trivialize it to such.

The goal of freezing the accounts was to make the truckers unable to buy food or pay rent to force a near immediate end. If the civil disobedience starts being evictions and starving protests are going to become a thing of the past.

There is a massive difference between freezing someone's funds, and having them simply pay a fine

I drew Mickey quite a few times without any helicopter appearing. Do you have a source for that claim?

Not only Russian or Chinese, you should open the bracket for any individual, organization or country that the western democracies will deem bad in their view. Or even have the any doubt of association with them. For example we can talk to many Muslims in the UK where no banks will grant them accounts (close account without notice) and how safe they feel [1]

Not that I am a crypto supporter, but the current western based financial system hegemony is good until you are have wrong name, religion, country... etc.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-08-16/british-m...

> what could you possibly do?

Magical Amulets?

Fake your own death, move into a submarine?

If your government wants to cut you off from your money, they'll do it for crypto just as easily as they do it for traditional banks. With the exception of direct-crypto purchases from shady internet sites, at some point your payment rails must pass through an entity that your government has some degree of authority over—you're not going to buy your groceries using Bitcoin over an onion service.

Even if crypto becomes 100% ubiquitous, the end game isn't "now the government can't control finance" the end game is "now the government will find a new way to control the new finance". Eventually, the government will intervene because people will be begging them to, because they don't actually want to live in a world where theft and fraud are irreversible and their entire financial life is tied to a set of cryptographic keys that they barely understand.

You're trying to push a technological solution to authoritarianism, and it's not going to work for the masses. Canada doesn't need crypto, Canada needs voters to hold the government accountable for its abuses.

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