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Comment by ulrikrasmussen | Hacker News Reader

To begin with, let me say I'm very sorry this happened to you, and I think it sounds like an example of a really broken system. This should never happen to someone randomly, and I think you should have been compensated a lot for the troubles and stress it must have caused you.

However, I think we should be careful with drawing the conclusion that technology for circumventing our institutions' ability to regulate altogether is the natural solution, when perhaps fixing the institutions would lead to an overall better outcome. If we all moved to Bitcoin, then we would no longer have central democratic control over who is allowed to transact or not, and I don't think that leads to a better society.

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Everybody should be allowed to transact. While transactions can be results of crimes, transactions are not crimes themselves.

Governments should stop crimes that may lead to transactions, not transactions.

I don't think that's true. Isn't a transfer of money to a terrorist organization an act of crime, for example?

What the parent is suggesting isn’t that there aren’t criminal transactions but that there shouldn’t be.

The analogy would be free speech. It shouldn’t be illegal to write an article in support of terrorists even though becoming one might be.

It’s not a right we currently recognize but it’s a cogent argument.

Calling that control “democratic” is a bit of a stretch.

Plus, anonymous physical cash transactions have been the status quo forever

The institutions ought to be under democratic control in the sense that they are regulated by elected representatives. If they are not, then that is a big problem which should be fixed rather than circumventing the institutions altogether.

Physical cash is de facto restricted in many places in the form of upper bounds on the amounts that one can withdraw and deposit.

No they aren’t. There are laws requiring documentation of cash transactions over a threshold.

Nope, we don’t want central democratic control over who can transact. We want no control.

An open exchange is progressive. A verified list of people who can transact is a closed stockmarket. Democratic imples a direct vote which is very far from true.

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