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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Nobody is protecting you from yourself. They're trying to protect other people from the damage you can do as an addict, a child pornographer, or a terrorist.

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Everytime you, or someone who thinks like you, about the "Next Big Thing" in Terrorism, Child Porn and Drug Trafficking, replace that "Next Big Thing" technology with the "Internet", and reconsider the argument you were about to make.

I don't think too many people could've envisioned the good the Internet could do in the future, when it was launched. And it's also so much easier to think about the bad ways in which it could be used. Heck, I think the Internet today is still mostly about porn. Does that mean we should ban it because it's only 30-40 percent "useful"?

Look at Popcorn Time and torrenting. Netflix, Amazon, Google, Apple, could all use the same technology to drastically reduce their bandwidth with only a few servers to seed all shows at all time. But there's so much stigma about it from the beginning. Torrenting for legal stuff could be huge. But it's not because people like you yelled from the beginning about how it's a "piracy tool".

So let's try and not repeat the same mistakes with new innovations such as Bitcoin. which was also in the news mostly for drug trafficking in the early days, but fortunately Bitcoin users managed to successful promote and overcome that with the "good uses", and by yelling at sites for continuing to talk about Bitcoin as a "drug tool".

Same goes for OpenBazaar, Ethereum, Storj, Firechat and other innovations that may start gaining adoption.

It's also really unfortunate that the Facebook era + massive US government propaganda against Tor, is also making Tor and anonymity seem like a "bad thing" these days, even though most people on the Internet were "anonymous" in the early days. And guess what - the world didn't collapse!

>Nobody is protecting you from yourself. They're trying to protect other people from the damage you can do as an addict, a child pornographer, or a terrorist.

This is patently false. Counter-examples include A) non-addictive, very safe drugs are also illegal B) NYC tried to outlaw large sodas C) unpasteurized milk is illegal.

Just because you can pull out three (or any number) examples of shitty laws doesn't mean he's wrong.

Except for the fact that the OP claimed "Nobody is protecting you from yourself." To which the person you responded to directly disputed with examples.

I think you need to re-evaluate what you classify as incorrect.

What is terrorism, actually? If you give this question some serious thought, it becomes apparent that the term is full of confusion. Politicians perpetuate – and exploit – this ambiguity; causing greater harm by diverting attention away from issues which really do need to be addressed.

More people are killed by the police than terrorism in the United States.

http://www.alternet.org/more-americans-killed-police-terrori...

You can question what terrorism is when you're in the grey area. But some things are just black/white terrorism, like the Boston Marathon bombing.

The Boston Marathon bombing was a terrible tragedy. They purchased their supplies from regular retail outlets, not a unregulated internet market. [1]

Which goes back to my original point. Linking terrorism to OpenBazaar is a far stretch and is rooted in fear, not data.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Marathon_bombings

It will always be possible to cause harm with legal objects, unless they ban fists and teeth.

While I think linking terrorism is a stretch, there are benefits to regulating the sale of things designed specifically to cause death, automatic firearms, high capacity magazines, warheads...

you are right, but child porn and addicts are already in the world. You fear addicts for good reasons. But if one looks how countries which legalized drugs are doing, you will see that violence, crime and number of addicts are decreasing.

e.g. Portugal: - Drug use among adolescents (13-15 yrs) and "problematic" users declined.[15] - Drug-related criminal justice workloads decreased.[15] - Decreased street value of most illicit drugs, some significantly

(although recreational (soft) drug use seemed to increase)

Child porn prohibition is not about consumers. It is about increasing the risk on (and taking the market away from) producers, who are necessarily actually abusing real children (who are not the producers themselves) in the real world in an unambiguously horrific way, with the end result that less child abuse happens.

You will have to try pretty hard to spin that into being the same thing as drug prohibition.

Arguments are, of course, less strong for convicting 16/17-year-olds of child porn for sexting, and even for removing images that were produced long ago.

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