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Comment by ckastner | Hacker News Reader

> 2) Because a permission-less censorship-resistant decentralized financial system has the potential to truly improve society, hence worth spending energy on it.

The other side of the coin: a permission-less censorship-resistant decentralized financial system also re-introduces a substantial set of significant problems that societies have already long solved for themselves.

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In the words of Scott Alexander:

"People are using the contingent stupidity of our current government to replace lots of human interaction with mechanisms that cannot be coordinated even in principle. I totally understand why all these things are good right now when most of what our government does is stupid and unnecessary. But there is going to come a time when – after one too many bioweapon or nanotech or nuclear incidents – we, as a civilization, are going to wish we hadn’t established untraceable and unstoppable ways of selling products."

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Predicting a future of devestation. You would think we would be past buying into that ruse by now.

Is it that far fetched? Right now most disk encrypting ransomware demands bitcoin for decryption.

Are biological weapons being used to mass murder people a natural extrapolation of ransomware?

No and I take your point, but I guess the extrapolation is the anonymous nature of blockchain cryptocurrencies enable a class of crime that would be much more difficult with traditional currencies.

We're not that far yet, but the potential is there. The closest thing are the current bitcoin-powered dark markets, where people buy various kinds of drugs (of various levels of harm and legality), including custom-made chemicals.

I have news for you, people already buy custom made chemicals from China all the time. It doesn't take darknet markets. The potential is there for lots of horrific actions. They aren't avoided by a government making them impossible, people generally don't want to hurt other people, nor do they want to face the consequences of doing so.

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