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Comment by random28345 | Hacker News Reader

"See, Bitcoin isn't just for illegal drug purposes. It's also for illegally circuventing currency controls!"

Psychic prediction. In ten years, there will be some jurisdictions where possesion of a copy of the bitcoin ledger will be a criminal offense.

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Well, Argentina's currency controls are legendary for how awful they are. If you want a lesson in how NOT to manage monetary policy, look at Argentina since about 1900. The country was the richest in the world at the time, but since then has alternated between boom and bust thanks to its disastrous monetary policy. Evading the government's currency controls is a way of life for Argentinians.

The Economist published an interesting report about that some months ago. The main takeaways were that (1) Argentine was rich, but lagged behind its money-peers in human development indexes such as literacy rates and (2) The elite from Argentina benefited from high food prices, so the rest of the country resented them, a brewing pot for populism.

But your point stands, monetary (or fiscal) policy was awful.

I suspect the only reason this hasn't happened already is because some very wealthy & connected people are profiting and avoiding taxes with bitcoin. Thus it's important that the masses use it too otherwise it'll just be them standing out like a sore thumb. IIRC, they kept trying to make bitcoin illegal in China but for some reason they couldn't. I think it's because of the aforementioned reason.

Two parties privately trading currencies in Argentina is already illegal. You need a special permit to make a purchase (which isn't easy to get).

So, we consider bitcoin a legally-accepted currency, then it's already illegal to trade for them.

One of the main problems is that legally trading ARS to USD has a huge overhead:

* You have to use the "official" price, which is ~60-70% the street price. * You have to pay 30-40% taxes on the exchange.

There are already links to child porn in the blockchain.

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