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Comment by thanhhaimai | Hacker News Reader

Opinions are my own.

There is something called the "gun test". The crypto on an encrypted hard drive is not more secure than the gold bars in a locked safe. Its security is a function of how the secret holder response to gun-on-their-head events. In this case, since the government is directly involved (and angry), a lot of criminals may pick personal safety over assets.

Frankly, I think a large portion of cryptocurrency proponents are overly confident in its "decentralization" and "safety". Cryptocurrency is only as safe as gold bars in a locked safe; and worse if you use a public exchange.

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In the bitcoin space it’s colloquially known as the “$5 wrench attack.”

All the cryptographic, air gapped security hardware doesn’t matter if someone can beat the keys out of you.

Source: https://xkcd.com/538/

Also perhaps a fair reason for some part of taxation. Owning millions in .*coin, and the ability to freely wander around in a first world country while not getting hit with a wrench has a whole lot of value.

Indeed, something I've tried to communicate to wealthy friends and family is that a higher tax rate,used halfway effectively, means you don't have to live in a gated community, in fear. You can roll around in your Ferrari, live where you want, and be reasonably safe.

> "used halfway effectively"

That's usually the problem that people who pay a lot of taxes have with the taxes.

And a better economy means your stocks and business ventures will do better.

I've heard of this security that comes from a bit of taxation phrased as "guillotine insurance".

This is why all crypto arguments end in “world peace” or a Bitcoin nation state which is centralization. The end game never makes sense.

This is commonly referred to as Rubber-hose cryptanalysis:

In cryptography, rubber-hose cryptanalysis is a euphemism for the extraction of cryptographic secrets (e.g. the password to an encrypted file) from a person by coercion or torture[1]—such as beating that person with a rubber hose, hence the name—in contrast to a mathematical or technical cryptanalytic attack.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-hose_cryptanalysis

Julian Assange and a couple of others developed a file stem called Rubberhose to avoid this problem. All of the filesystem structures, data, and free space are indistinguishable from noise without the decryption key. The system always sets up some portion of the filesystem as unusable space that's initialized to noise. This space may contain another Rubberhose instance, which would also have some unusable space in it.

If you're tortured to keep revealing keys to deeper and deeper volumes, eventually you're going to hit a point where there are no more volumes, but you can't prove it.

I think the original threat model was someone willing to torture you, but willing to accept plausible deniability once you'd revealed some moderately sensitive information.

In reality, if someone is willing to torture you a couple volumes deep, there's a good chance they're going to just keep torturing you forever. Rubberhose may still work in this model, since in theory the promise of avoiding torture loses most of its power. The downside is that once you format a partition with Rubberhose, you're resigning yourself to being tortured forever.

While I tend to agree with your argument, there is a difference: crypto is safe if no one knows it exists, or rather no one can link ownership to owner.

It's very hard to do this with gold.

So you accrue wealth and can never use it. What’s the point?

Plenty of ways to use crypto wealth. It isn't that hard hard go from accessing Tor on a public WiFi, to say cashing out $100k in physical cash.

I think you're missing the point entirely. The government can't seize your virtual coins, but the only point of money is to spend it on actual goods, which the government definitely can seize.

How is this different than burying gold?

A. You can store redundant copies in various secret locations.

B. To bury gold you must transport the valuable property in meat space to your hiding spot after acquiring it. With cryptocurrency, you hide the secrets before they have value and transfer the funds to them without new data actually traveling to the hiding spot, electronically or physically.

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