Hacker News Reader

Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

Obviously the biggest one is concern over things like hyperinflation, which has happened in the real-world many times.

Or, not quite at hyperinflation, but your government is enacting policies based on MMT or similar and you are worried that this could hurt you (as a holder of the currency) in the long-run.

Or, maybe you're worried about governments being able to dictate what you are allowed to purchase with "their" money.

Or, maybe you want to send your money somewhere your government doesn't want you to send it (or their government doesn't want the other party to get it).

Obviously there is a lot more to cryptocurrency than just "not being issued by a government" as well though. There is general privacy benefits (Monero) or the promise of innovation if you have programmable money / contracts (Ethereum).

View on HN

I don't always agree w/ my government here in the US, but I do like that--while it's not a perfect process--as a democracy I can influence it. The reason it's illegal to buy certain things in the US (people, organs, drugs, assassinations) is that we all got together and thought people shouldn't do that. Many people disagree but, that's what voting is for. Subverting the will of a democratic people is... immoral?

The typical counterargument is something like "well what about Saudi Arabia", but I think it's pretty easy for an oppressive regime to just say "you can't use cryptocurrency" and punish you severely for it--to the degree you won't.

Anyway, I just don't think cryptocurrency is a solution to this, and even if it is it's antidemocratic.

You assume that government is good and prohibited uses are bad.

But your gov banned wikileaks bank accounts in the past and that is the perfect example of the case when the gov is definitely is a malicious actor (while their behaviour perfectly rational from their side of things).

Govs do war crimes, mass espionage and human rights violations. That should be addressed as well.

Yes, but it should be addressed democratically - protests, lobbying your representatives, even voting. Inventing a new currency that is, for a little while, hard to track by the government isn't a real solution, it's just pretending the problem doesn't exist.

The government is persecuting WikiLeaks financially because that is easy to do. Even if a cryptocurrency were to take off as a currency and still be untraceable, the government would just move on to some other form of persecution. The real problem to be addressed is the persecution of a useful legitimate organization by an ostensibly democratic government. The form that persecution takes is secondary.

> it should be addressed democratically - protests, lobbying your representatives, even voting.

That hasn't worked yet for Wikileaks. If this worked and/or was the best way to deal with the types of problems Wikileaks is exposing, there would be no need for Wikileaks to exist.

The reason Wikileaks does exist is because, typically, when we attempt to address atrocities "democratically" we get nowhere.

On the other hand...

> Inventing a new currency that is, for a little while, hard to track by the government

This _has_ worked for Wikileaks in the past. When the US persecuted Wikileaks, Bitcoin helped to heavily negate the immediate impact of this action.

> The form that persecution takes is secondary.

In that case, why can't the form that Wikileaks' solutions take be secondary as well? If we are in agreement that Wikileaks is an important organization, then when addressing atrocities "democratically" fails, what would be wrong with short-term innovation?

If you're assuming that you can work around an imperfect government, which you don't think can be fixed democratically, through cryptocurrency, especially for a core statehood domain, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you :-)

> You assume that government is good and prohibited uses are bad.

Not quite. We assume that government is controlled by the people and thus I have some influence in its operation. The state often does truly horrible things, but so do plenty of organizations that I cannot control at all. I'll take the one that I have some degree of influence on.

All getting together and deciding on something is the rosy version of how our democracys laws come to be or how we decide to go to war, for instance. It feels like people "all got together" if you accept that the apparent consensus of the public you perceive through news and other media is a real reflection of their sentiments rather than a rudder on the boat of public opinion. See Chomsky's manufacturing consent. The "public discourse" is really always a mix of propaganda and real ground truth, and they're hard to separate, but there are certainly strong influences exerted by organized groups.

I'm not a finance expert, but I don't think those issues are caused by the kind of money used.

People make mistakes, some of them are greedy, powerful people want to keep their power, etc..

You can't fix people with a currency.

And humans are creative, if you switch over to crypto, they'll find a new way of doing the same old things..

My government not wanting me to send money somewhere: Well, this might be a clichè, but apart from slightly limiting my freedom this prevents bad guys doing nasty stuff aswell.

>"...My government not wanting me to send money somewhere: Well, this might be a clichè, but apart from slightly limiting my freedom this prevents bad guys doing nasty stuff aswell..."

Bad guys get around it one or the other way. You do not.

The end of the gold standard in the 70s meant the US could "afford" to fight infinite wars by just printing dollars and passing the real cost to the rest of the world, that is why the US is now the world's biggest borrower nation when it used to be the world's biggest creditor nation. The current state of endless military interventions is only possible because of the huge deficits in the US that are not possible with hard money.

Yeah, but both hyperinflation and hyperdeflation have occurred with Bitcoin.

At least with fiat currency, you have a central bank that can TRY to take steps to fix those conditions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com