Comment by Eridrus
13 hours ago
I think the case for why strong encryption is important is much clearer than why untraceable financial instruments are important and I don't think it's super compelling to argue that these things are actually the same, even if your opposition to government control is the same.
I think it's actually pretty clear that almost all people are not capable of secure and reliable self-custody and would be better off with an intermediary. We're not keeping our fiat currency in a safe under our bed after all.
I think it makes sense to start from the idea that you should be able to transfer funds to someone, like $100 to your mother, without needing the government or a megacorp to facilitate it. The same way I can gift my TV to my mom.
Whether that's cash or cryptocurrency doesn't seem to matter since your argument would also apply to cash.
If you start from an assumption that there should be no regulation, then your conclusion will be that there should be no regulation.
That's not actually an argument for anyone who doesn't share your assumptions though and is largely just lazy thinking.
Cash also has physical limitations that make large cross-border transactions hard, which crypto does not.
Start from the assumption of liberty and the freedom of association. Unfortunately, most people don't believe in human liberty and prefer varying degrees of slavery.
> If you start from an assumption that there should be no regulation, then your conclusion will be that there should be no regulation
To be fair, they argued against intermediation. Not regulation. Requiring a filing for every $100 cash transfer to one's mother would satisfy their requirement.
How about this:
Regulation is a controlling mechanism that puts constraints on what people can and can't do. Some constraints will enable more things to happen because it reduces certain risks (e.g. property rights and laws against stealing enable investment and development of property).
But when there is too much regulation it has the opposite effect, and instead of enabling progress it stifles it. It acts as a calcification that slows change and makes society less adaptable.
So it's not that regulation is bad, it's that too much regulation can be bad.
Now in terms of regulating people's abilities to transact specifically: in a health democracy putting some regulations on transactions will probably have a positive effect because it can limit abuse and risk, and therefore increase freedom for honest people to make transactions. However when a civilization reaches the point in its life cycle when it is transitioning from a healthy plurality into authoritarianism, the risk of over-regulation of transactions skyrockets and the elimination of privacy when transacting is extremely likely to lead to tyranny.
When someone acts like regulating transactions is inherently bad, they're either repeating something they heard and didn't question, or they're assuming the people they are speaking to are educated in history and have a healthy fear of tyranny.
If you start with the assumption there should be regulation, even then IDK how you get there.
You're regulating an "untraceable" utterance of a string of data.
Pragmatically it's worse than trying to stop fentanyl, which is already impossible, and even trying to stop it has just made the gangs that much more powerful because they now control whole small nation-state tier light-infantry militias funded by black-market profits induced from trying to ban it.
I honestly don't see any way to effectively ban cryptocurrency that has net positive utility. "Yay we caught some criminals, all it cost us was a dystopia!"
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Exactly! I want digital cash. We have the technology to do that, so why not? The tech crowd hyped up Bitcoin, but why never privacy coins? Any single flaw becomes killer, even if the flaw is unrelated to privacy or even petty. Hell, I'd even take a US ZKP-based stable coin that was pre-mined (but had strong privacy guarantees) and had even a small (like 0.1-0.5%) gas fee that ended up acting as some form of consumption tax. At least then there's some guarantee of tax revenue while maintaining the notion that Big Brother doesn't need to know I gave my friend some beer money.
Our world worked with cash before. Sure, it wasn't perfect, but are those imperfections worse than the mass invasion of our privacy? There's no perfect system, so the only question is how we weight certain issues, not that flaws exist. If we purity test then the only winners are the immoral people who are willing to lie and deceive so that their choice appears to pass said purity tests. They love us to spend our time infighting because that's less time working against them.
Cash and crypto do share similar properties that way... but with cash, you can't deposit say, $1,000,000 in cash into a bank, where you can use it for a lot more types of transactions, without forms being filed with the government, in order to both instill fear into the hearts of drug dealers and gangsters (etc) and to help catch them if they're dumb enough.
Now, drug dealers sometimes do just do as many transactions as possible with cash, outside the banking system, for that reason. But they're hindered by these anti-laundering regulations, which is considered a good thing by most.
To me then it sounds reasonable to impose similar limits and reporting obligations - treating crypto as much like cash as is practical - when it comes to exchanging crypto for dollars in any way. It doesn't prevent Bad People from conducting transactions in BTC directly, but they have always been able to do so with cash for some things.
The far left doesn't believe in the idea of property ownership in the traditional sense. So no, I think the premise that you can transfer property to anyone without the government tracking it is incorrect. Taxes could theoretically be imposed, registration might be required to comply with a social "program" they are implementing, etc.
Yes, it might be true that most people aren't willing to keep their money under their beds for security reasons.
But it shouldn't be illegal or somehow indicative of criminality.
Same thing with self custody of crypto.
It's not illegal. They're talking about flagging it as "suspicious". Lots of legal things are flagged as suspicious by law enforcement.
Would that make it a probable cause for searches and seizures?
If so, that would be pretty bad right?
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I think you are conflating 2 things: - ability to privately give money to someone (mechanism is irrelevant, by hand or by way of a blockchain) - self-custody risks for uninformed users
The first one is the privacy argument.
Would you be comfortable if you’re not allowed to give the cash in your pocket to someone without someone watching over? If the answer is no, you are pro privacy for financial transactions.
Cash has the privacy feature as a default. You can argue that 3rd parties that help you send cash don’t have to offer any privacy, but BTC isn’t that, and forcing it to be that way is an attack on privacy.
I don't have a predetermined opinion on whether it is good or bad for cash to be untraceable.
I think arguments for privacy are pretty poorly argued and often come down to "isn't the idea of someone watching you icky" which this thread is not disabusing me of.
> I think arguments for privacy are pretty poorly argued and often come down to "isn't the idea of someone watching you icky" which this thread is not disabusing me of.
Now imagine that "someone" hates people like you, has the power to hurt you with impunity and is actively looking for any excuse to do so.
The main argument for privacy is that a lack of privacy is the primary vehicle of crimes against humanity.
When you do not have privacy, you must then have trust. You are trusting, typically blindly, that your governments and other organizations will not use knowledge against you.
Before the Holocaust, Germany built a registry of known Jews by census. Obviously at the time, nobody knew what it could be used for, the latent evil within just plain information. It was done innocently, naively.
The same applies to all privacy violations. Yes, we could monitor, record, and analyze all text messages. Sure.
What are the consequences of that? What if you live somewhere where being gay is punishable by execution? What if you out yourself?
What if you're not even gay, but it seems as though you might be?
Or what if you live in an authoritarian state, and dissent is punished with death? Your government has cornered you. They can do whatever they like, and you cannot so much as vocalize complaints.
You may say, "oh well this isn't the case for me, so who cares?"
Yes, now, in this particular point in time, in your very specific place. What garantees do you have that things stay that way? None. You are blindly trusting that those who hold your information will not weaponize it.
You have given your enemies a gun, loaded it for them, held it up to your forehead, and said "please don't pull the trigger"
As a thought experiment, imagine how differently the underground railroad would look if everyone had smartphones that were tracked and communications surveilled.
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I agree, send me your bank account login info and I can keep it safe for you.
Believing a profit-motivated corporation or individual is trustworthy long term especially in an age of quick mergers and acquisitions is .. deeply naive to say the least.