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Comment by nosuchthing | Hacker News Reader

This was actually something Coinbase pitched to investors - the ability for Bitcoin and other crypto currencies to bypass the American legal system, FINCEN etc [1]:

  Coinbase, which recently raised $75 million in seed 
  funding from prominent financial institutions such as the 
  New York Stock Exchange, said one of the four biggest 
  advantages of bitcoin is that it is "immune to country-
  specific sanctions," citing Russia as an example, in a 
  PowerPoint presentation put together for investors by the 
  company late last year.

[1] https://freebeacon.com/national-security/bitcoin-exchange-hi...

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It's a fantastic use case. I could almost guarantee that anyone who disagrees hasn't lived under an oppressive government.

I could almost guarantee that anyone who thinks anarchocapitalism is an innovation has never been kidnapped, ransomed, subject to extortion, or lived under a corrupt regime supported though bribes and cronyism.

Crypto isn't anarchocapitalism and that is derailing the subject. All those social ills occur under countries with regulated fiat currency.

You just said, in paraphrase using cryptocurrency software "[to bypass the legal system is a] fantastic use case", which is anarchocapitalism in its purest form.

You can't pretend cryptocurrency is made to bypass only unjust laws and regulations.

Look up the definition of anarchocapitalism, please, and you'll see it doesn't match the definition of what we are dealing with. Distributed internet also evades the ability of most single nations to censor or regulate it. Does that also make the internet anarchocapitalism? Every technology is used illegally sometimes. That's not an argument in itself.

The exact terminology is beside the point. Cryptocurrency software is a large scale enabler for ransom, kidnapping, and money laundering, bribery, etc.

There's a reason ransomware was not feasible with cash at the scale it's happening today.

>Cryptocurrency software is a large scale enabler for ransom, kidnapping, and money laundering, bribery, etc

All of those were done before cryptocurrency even existed. It's not enabling those things if those things are clearly possible without cryptocurrency.

The difference is the ease and magnitude.

Where there even cases of demanding payments for ransomware before Bitcoin?

Ransomware and international money laundering are easier with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Monereo.

It's arguably their only real world use case due to the high overhead cost, risk, and instability of transacting though those systems versus "traditional" fiat based transfer systems.

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