Hacker News Reader

Comment by thecoffman | Hacker News Reader

Sigh... the same old political arguments rehashed for the nth time, but with links to Krugman blog posts and some class warfare for taste this time around!

> I’ve enjoyed the thought experiment of Bitcoin as much as the next nerd, but it’s time to dispense with the opportunism and adolescent fantasies of a crypto-powered stateless future and return to the work of building technology and social services that meaningfully and accountably improve our collective quality of life.

So... because you feel that this is what we should be expending resources on, the full coercive power of the state should be brought to bear in order to force others to do it. Neat!

View on HN

The 'full coercive power of the state' part of your comment seems invented out of thin air. Where does he advocate a military crackdown on Bitcoin?

In this context, (the techno-crypto-libertarians he so readily dismisses) any state regulation is inherently coercive. There's no such thing as non-coercive intervention by government. It doesn't have anything to do with military intervention.

'any state regulation is inherently coercive' is a far cry from 'full coercive power of the state'. Obviously any regulation requires state coercion, that's how it works. So are you saying that anyone who advocates regulation of any kind is implicitly advocating the full force of the state being brought to bear on that particular problem? If so, I have news for you: That's very much not how this country works, at least.

If anything, we have a vast set of regulations that are enforced with an insufficient amount of coercive force, sometimes with no coercive force at all. Many of those said regulations are ignored by people like bankers who know that any defiance will at most be punished with small fines.

I feel that we're arguing semantics here. You've already said that any regulation requires state coercion, it seems we're just not seeing eye-to-eye on the "full force" portion of the statement.

When men with guns show up to lock you in a cage against your will I don't think it particularly matters if it was the "full force", half the force or a tiny percentage of the force of the state... the end result is the same.

As for the second part of your response, I suppose the level of necessary regulation and enforcement is another topic altogether and one which I didn't attempt to address in my initial comment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com