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Comment by jimmaswell | Hacker News Reader

Putting absolute trust and surrendering too much agency to the state has been proven a mistake many times throughout history. Citizens need fallbacks when the state fails them. Concrete example where crypto achieves this: many trans people in places with an inadequate medical system or hostile government turn to buying gray-market DIY hormones online, facilitated by crypto.

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Sure, but approximately zero of the actual crypto space/hype was built around facilitating this kind of thing. In fact for that use case, it would’ve been better if Bitcoin never got nearly as big as it has (since that lead to much more government scrutiny, all over the world). Ideally it would’ve gotten large enough that there were enough reputable-ish exchanges that you could move fiat in and out, and then stopped there. Like some sort of digital Hawala.

I also use crypto to bypass government prohibition on unprescribed self-medication. Is it still noble if I'm buying cocaine?

Is it necessarily the case that it isn't? Suppose you can't afford health insurance and you have a condition for which a controlled substance would be prescribed, if you had access to the healthcare system, but you don't. If you then buy it over the internet, is the system being wronged by you or are you being wronged by the system?

The war on drugs is a scam. Cocaine prohibition is a pretext to oppress indigenous peoples of the Andes. https://filtermag.org/world-health-organization-coca-prohibi...

The war on drugs is a scam, but pretty sure if the primary goal was to oppress indigenous people in another country the US government could’ve found a cheaper way (both fiscally and politically).

Yeah, it's more of a cherry on top than a primary goal.

I don’t think Nixon cared about indigenous people in South America. Not because he was a great guy, just because they didn’t matter to him even slightly. He definitely cared about communist militias though.

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