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Comment by betwixthewires | Hacker News Reader

I see your perspective. There's another perspective from which you could look at the details of your situation.

You deferred to a trusted party to secure your wealth and because that third party was untrustworthy, you have to defer to an intermediary.

Had you deferred to yourself to secure your wealth you wouldn't be in this situation. The ledger would be the canonical one of ownership and possession, and you wouldn't have to defer to anyone.

Basically, you kept your bitcoin in a traditional, legally enforceable arrangement instead of the bottom layer, algorithmically enforced environment and now have to defer to the traditional system to restore possession.

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Ok - so follow along with me here:

I owned no bitcoins at the time I desired to trade bitcoins for a physical product (in this case: ~7g of Cannabis)

What recourse do I have that does not require trusting a third party?

I do not own the required compute power to mine it myself (not technically true at the time, although certainly true today)

I'd like to have you walk me through the exact set of steps to acquire my bitcoin and use them to purchase that physical good, where I can magically avoid placing any trust in a 3rd party.

1) generate a private key,

2) move it to the private key.

When you're ready to spend it, spend it. Those places where you were looking to buy cannabis have escrow services, at the time you'd have had to trust the platform only upon purchase, nowadays multisig escrow is standard, which requires significantly less trust in a single party.

Move what to the private key? How do I get those coins in the first place?

Move the bitcoin to your brigade key.

However you can.

Any time you make a purchase, of anything, you're trusting the seller. Leaving it in their custody is where you screw up. Imagine you bought bitcoin from me, but then asked me to hang on to it for you for free. Or a car. Or anything. It's absurd.

Ok, so we're in a spot where trust is literally required - but the ledger cannot be updated to reflect when that trust was broken or misplaced (at least not without falling back to an external power - namely: government).

So again - the entire value of the medium is predicated on having a legal system you can use to resolve these disputes.

Following - that legal system requires all sorts of control to actually resolve those disputes: Many of the things bitcoin advocates actively rail against are just methods of reconciliation (Funds freezing, reversed transactions, 3rd party control of assets, etc).

So either

1. The legal system will stop supporting exchanges of that medium (see: China)

2. The legal system will add back all those controls (see: Legislation in the US)

Basically - My entire point is that bitcoin only has value if current governments support its exchange, and they WONT do that if it's a negative to them (and it is, unless they can tax and control it).

They want you to go back to frontier days before specialization in the economy, you are supposed to hoard your wealth yourself and protect your family with a gun

This exactly! (not to mention only ever making exchanges in person, because remote exchanges require trust)

Which is hilarious. Because that's actually all that bitcoin was good for: black market deals/trades, where enforcement is left up to you anyways.

Unfortunately, that makes it a (fucking terrible) medium of exchange for absolutely anything else, unless you add back in all the government regulation that the crypto folks hate.

You could have reduced the risk substantially by transferring off their wallet to yours right after purchase. You still could have purchased your weed too.

There was no holding. It wasn't an asset I was interested in holding, it was a medium of exchange to purchase a good I couldn't otherwise get.

The coins would sit in the wallet for as long as it took me to figure out how to place an order on silk-road again, where I would buy down to as small an amount of bitcoin as I could.

I got unlucky the last time through and hit it right when the service went down.

Which is funny - because the attitude that I should be hiding my coins away as tightly as possible is exactly why I'm so non-plussed on bitcoin: It's no longer an medium of exchange, it's a speculative asset with price completely unhinged from utility (which in my opinion is basically just buying black market goods).

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