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Comment by nk1tz | Hacker News Reader

The beautiful thing about Bitcoin is that is it a pure, global, free market writ large. There is absolutely nothing you can do to prevent individuals from choosing to participate in it. Therefore the correct retort to someone like you is to tell you to "cry harder".

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You've correctly explained the tragedy of the commons, congratulations. This is exactly why we need regulation to stop people selfishly destroying the environment for everyone for personal gain.

This isn't correct, though. If I decide to start an anti-Bitcoin political movement, I can get leaders elected who can ban the use of Bitcoin in the USA. Sure, some motivated folks will use VPNs and the like, but cutting the general public off from Bitcoin would be devastating. Then who will be crying?

lol, try and ban bitcoin

Why would that be hard? It's used for tons of illegal activity (ransomware as an example).

Only .4% of bitcoin transactions are used for illegal activities.

It'd be hard because you'd have to find every single node and disconnect it from the internet, and something like 90% of Bitcoin nodes run over TOR

> Only .4% of bitcoin transactions are used for illegal activities.

And you know this... how?

Did you know that 96% of statistics are made up on the spot?

https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2021/01/20/chainalysis-crypto-ill...

Here's a source if you're curious

Ah yes, cryptonomist.ch. Such a reliable, and unbiased source!

do you have a metric for what is reliable and unbiased? Any time I see an article on Bitcoin or altcoins on a MSM page its factually incorrect and heavily biased.

Also, can you provide an article showing that Bitcoin is used for "tons" (whatever percentage tons means) of illegal activity?

I think I’ll flip it around. Knowing that every major ransom ware attack in the last year has used Bitcoin, have there been any meaningful legal uses? Has anyone bought a pizza?

Where's your source for that? Is there a metric to define a ransomware attack as "major", and a verifiable list to show the amount and means of payment?

Bitcoin is used daily for remittance payments, which is huge since it's way cheaper than sending money through western mutual

There's also Bitcoin Beach in El Salvador which is a bitcoin only circular economy

Paxful provides a service for people to trade gift cards for Bitcoin

I'm sure the criminals are doing a great job of making sure that they look like they're in the 99.6%!

I can easily think of a number of measures that would make it much harder to participate in the bitcoin market that governments could implement without much trouble.

A critiquing/problem-aware mindset can rightly point to risks and inappropriate excess. In that sense it is part of healthy self-regulation.

If you let it take over, the ensuing negativity and Weltschmerz might paralyze you.

And true, most criticism (whether justified or not) comes to nothing if there's a lack of regulating entity that could do something about it.

> There is absolutely nothing you can do to prevent individuals from choosing to participate in it.

Governments in authoritarian countries have shut down bitcoin mining operations and arrested people.

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