Comment by dmantis
7 hours ago
Depends on the actor.
From western perspective, maybe, but there are many people in the world who don't trust neither their government, nor western ones: Iranians, Russians, some Chinese, etc.
BTC is a nice safe place for money, which can't be touched by neither of state adversaries. Underperforming some other asset classes is totally acceptable, when your expectation for the brokerage account is effectively zero after arrest/freeze/sanctions.
I would buy your argument, if bitcoin were the only cryptocurrency.
For most of the people you mention, a fiduciary cryptocurrency like these 'stable coins' is the better product.
(If you don't trust the value of the USD, and thus don't want a stable coin linked to that, you could use one that's linked to Swiss Franks or the Singapore dollar.)
> could use one that's linked to Swiss Franks or the Singapore dollar.
Well, if only we had something like that with a proper liquidity!
USDT/USDC are useful for the exchange to fiat, but have freeze function in their contract, thus posing a risk for big longterm savings, and they rot under the inflation (which btc generally beats).
There are indeed a couple of unfreezable stablecoins, but they don't have mainstream adoption and proper liquidity. USDT kind of captured the market by being first, and USDC is heavily pushed by the major institutional players, so here we are.
But that's true, it's more about crypto in general.
BTC can be touched by state actors easily.
Has been proofen often enough.
State actors can just hurt your famiily. State actors can setup a shadow bitcoin infrastructure and give you the feeling that your wallet is a save bitcoin wallet. They can Hijack the website you download the initial bitcoin wallet, the nodes you talk to.
> State actors can just hurt your famiily.
That actor has to know that you have something to be touched for in the first place. Which is not the case if you buy crypto without KYC unlike with the classical brokerage, for example.
> State actors can setup a shadow bitcoin infrastructure and give you the feeling that your wallet is a save bitcoin wallet. They can Hijack the website you download the initial bitcoin wallet, the nodes you talk to.
Is paranoid and not serious. Yes, they can do a lot in theory, but on practice even basic level opsec avoids it.
In reality if somebody from the state is already after you explicitly for real, you are going to die or be in prison. I can't really argue with that. Most people are not under active confrontation with the governments, but under passive snooping and pity everyday legal risks that make their lifes miserable.
In most cases they don't send hitmen neither for "foreign agents" labeled people from Russia, nor for sanctioned Russians outside from the US, for example. My point is about people who are not active fugitives, but, you know, want to keep their stuff with them without risking neither their country bank freeze, nor western-based financial infra freeze because they hold the wrong passport.
If russia or china has a real interest because relevant amount of people start using it, they would easyl be able to stop this.
Chinese firewall is real.
Putting fear into people with propaganda is real.
And yes i find my shadow bitcoin infrastructure not paranoid at all. It would be the first thing a state actor would do after closing everything through their state firewalls.