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Comment by pieix | Hacker News Reader

This shows another of the many ways in which a having a trusted third party involved in your finances is actually a good thing.

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Arguably the feature that makes kidnappings for ransom unattractive isn't necessarily traditional banks being trusted, but rather that traditional bank transfers are usually reversible (e.g. due to a court order).

That and regulatory scrutiny, bank rules limiting large transfers or the fact they can take 24 hours, etc.

But not if the transactions are going to the caynman islands and then from there somewhere else etc. I believe.

If you have a bank account in the same country, you also have an owner.

Still, it seems, the "barriers to entry" are much lower with crypto. (No need to send someone there to open a bank account, etc.)

Though doing a kidnapping in the middle of France is pretty ballsy anyway.

I haven't usually been enthusiastic about GNU Taler's "senders should be anonymous but recipients shouldn't" approach, but I guess kidnapping for ransom is an example where that policy might be beneficial.

And KYC

That’s part of what makes them trustworthy.

I guess is comes down to whether you think it's possible to prevent this kind of thing with nothing more than cleverly aligned incentives and cleverly applied cryptography.

If it is, then we'd be fools not to try, and having the trusted third party is just the better of several bad alternatives.

But it is a pretty audacious claim. I wish there were more radical optimists among us pursuing such things. Pity that that's not what most crypto is these days.

You definitely have to be a radical optimist to put faith in crypto at this point. Maybe Trump is an optimist too though

If Trump saw the potential in crypto that I see. He'd like it far less. e.g I've been tinkering with a protocol for refusing to pay federal taxes all at once. (Because it's not a useful threat if we're not united in it).

I draw a pretty thick line between what we're seeing out of it today and what we should be demanding of it.

Or you could see it as an argument for the second amendment. Would someone have attempted this against an executive based in Texas? I don’t think so.

I’m a big 2A supporter but would still want the would-be kidnapper to be deterred by other means. I can be incapacitated or caught unaware, JP Morgan and Charles Schwab cannot.

In headlines "FBI Busts Plot to Kidnap Miami Jeweler and Steal $2 Million in Crypto"

That seemed to rely more on good policing than the second amendment.

It has already happened in Texas:

https://archive.is/34qpX

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