> •Name, address, phone, and email;\
> blackmail each individual user
Blackmail would be the least of my worries, in France we had at least five kidnappings/attempted kidnappings related to crypto investors since the beginning of the year.
> blackmail each individual user
Blackmail would be the least of my worries, in France we had at least five kidnappings/attempted kidnappings related to crypto investors since the beginning of the year.
It is possible to make your transactions extremely difficult to trace, but you really, really, REALLY have to know what you're doing.
Law enforcement loves that people think it's easy and cheap to launder money with crypto, though. It's made it vastly easier for them to catch those people!
And I guess that includes protection from criminals by the oppressive forces of the State (aka the police). In which case being kidnapped and having your fingers sent to your family is an integral part of your 'freedom'.
Also i don't care about them getting judged for tax evasion, i know they won't be and honestly, good for them. I also don't care for nonviolent thieves and think the same thing about them. Profiteering was not how i was raised, but i understand different people have different standards (and parents, luckily mine are great, it's not the case for everybody). People do what they need to do, i found some comportment sociopathic, but as long as it is nonviolent, i'm not mad.
All of the victims are likely tax payers. Law and order is a fundamental service that a legitimate state must provide to all in its jurisdiction, even those who are only resident non-citizens and those that pay little to no taxes in a progressive tax system.
Saying crypto isn’t synonymous with anarchy, like the internet isn’t with pornography, sidesteps the point. Pornography is just one use of the internet — not its central purpose.
But crypto wasn’t just built to host financial activity — it was designed to restructure it, removing reliance on central authorities. That core intent isn’t a cliché; it’s a defining feature.
Comparing it to incidental internet content is a rhetorical deflection, not a real counterpoint.
You’re not supporting your central thesis that disintermediating finance is in any way related to removing government — and people using Coinbase, a service that is centralized and does collaborate with government regulation seems to directly counter your stereotype of the customers.
Their point is correct: people who match your fantasy wouldn’t be Coinbase customers — you’re relying on old tropes.
It was designed to solve the double-spending problem with digital currencies, replacing the need for "a authoritative ledger" with a one difficult to forge.
The political project around this was to provide people with a deflationary currency akin to gold, whose inflation could not be controlled by government.
The lack of government control over the inflation of this particular currency, and the lack of an authoritative ledger, are an extremely minimal sense of currency protections (, freedoms). They have as much to do with anarchy as the internet had with porn.
> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.
Failed countries (ie: Turkey) rely on the financial system for taxation. Functioning countries shouldn’t care or be bothered by it.
That's what people say, but it's probably not true given everyone leaves their coins on exchanges.
Thanks for the tone-policing. But instead of implicitly suggesting that my mindset or tone is inappropriate, it would be great if we discussed the substance of the points.
Sure, just read the sentence from my response that you skipped over.
To be clear: I didn't implicitly suggest that your mindset of people who use crypto somehow ceding their right to protection from the state was inappropriate, I stated outright that it was a disturbing and callous mindset.
It's like suggesting that people who protest against police brutality shouldn't get protection from the police in emergency situations, or believe people who are racist to healthcare workers should lose all right to healthcare. The type of mindset held by those who care more about retribution against those who hold different views than a just society.