Why we talk past each other about payments and crypto
praf.me
praf.me
"I pay a known enemy of state to fund a terrorist attack on citizens of your country." seems a bit extreme and movie-plot-y. How about something closer to home?
- "File-encryption malware receives untraceable payments from the victims"
- "Naive investors lose their life savings to scam. There is no way to recover funds"
- "An organization gets hacked, all of their money disappear"
Another thing is it's not all about "I", there is also second-order effect. For example, the malware attacks are on the rise precisely _because_ there is an untraceable payment method. So the first-order effect of theoretical crypto ban would be that victims cannot pay and recover their data (bad). But the second-order effect would be that there are much fewer malware attacks (good).
The examples you listed would all be lower priority.
And this means your pro-control statements like "I pay a known enemy of state to fund a terrorist attack" are pretty abstract - do you know anyone who funds terrorists? Why would terrorists use US banks anyway, surely they use gold or drugs or something?
On the other side, your anti-control side ("I buy illegal drugs from a friend for personal use.", "I buy a ticket to a comedy show that makes fun of your government.") is much more relatable - I have friends who I know buy illegal drugs! I go to comedy shows! So despite stakes being much lower, the feelings are much stronger.
So if you want to get balanced view, it's important to keep local, relatable reasons for both sides. "30 emergency rooms were closed due to a ransomware cyber-attack, and government has no way to track the attackers" is a nice example of the locally relatable argument for "control" side. "Scammers stole all of the life savings from someone. Government has no way to get this money back" is another one.