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Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

Even if nothing else pops out, it’s a huge error to point to illegal activity as some kind of bad, irrelevant use case. That smuggles in an assumption that lawbreakers are universally evil. There have been plenty of periods in history where those enforcing the law in a given country were the oppressors, and the resistant lawbreakers the innocent. It’s worth considering what the value proposition of crypto looks like if you were to find yourself living under an illegitimate authority. It may be marginal if the authority can stop it, but the more illegal activity we see in crypto the stronger the belief we should hold that it will be hard to suppress.

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> It’s worth considering what the value proposition of crypto looks like if you were to find yourself living under an illegitimate authority

The cables where communications pass through are protected by armies

If crypto eventually could pose a threat to those illegitimate authorities, they would give orders to cut the cables and games would be over.

they could also trace them back to your house.

I wrote:

> It may be marginal if the authority can stop it

Because often the response to claims like the one I made is to just hand wave it away as some kind of Armageddon situation. But it doesn't have to be. The USSR and the modern day CCP operate in an environment where certain levels of criminality are virtuous, but things are not so draconian or suppressive as the environment you state.

of course they would not literally cut the cables.

they would.block the crypto traffic

Give it a decade or two and we’ll have satellites beaming connectivity via lasers to the middle of territory controlled by authoritarian regimes.

We’ll probably also have aircraft or satellites run by some of those regimes looking for transmitters, of course.

If your government was cutting off access to internet over the possibility that people might use it to conduct their business in cryptocurrency, do you think local demand for crypto would increase or decrease?

The cable-cut might work for a while, but it wouldn't take too long for partition tolerant crypos emerge. You don't really need global consistency for most things, given that resources tend to be local.

> it wouldn't take too long for partition tolerant crypos emerge

Wouldn’t it? This is an unsolved problem and there is nothing that implies it can ‘quickly emerge’.

One of the paradoxes about crypto is that all problems with it can be quickly solved in the future, but somehow continue to exist in the present.

As far as moving the bits around goes, I think that the scuttlebutt protocol handles it nicely. And if you look at the tokenomics of CirclesUBI there's nothing to prevent partition tolerance--you already have the restriction that tokens can only move across links in the web of trust, so you'd just have to add the additional restriction that the parties involved in a transitive-trust-transaction have to be contactable for verification at the time of the transaction. Although CirclesUBI runs on Ethereum (xdai) and would have to be ported to scuttlebutt.

The plan isn't fully fleshed out: you still need to incentivize running nodes and handle cases where bad behavior on the part of node maintainers becomes transparent so that users can revoke trust in them, but my point is that this is not some blind faith in the ability of the community to adapt, but rather something that I have diagrams on my whiteboard for.

> The cable-cut might work for a while,

I don't see any crypto zealot laying cables in the ocean to connect Europe and USA

do you really think the army would allow it?

but cutting cables is the nuclear option, I see much more probable that terrorists will try it in the future, because is such a fundamental weakness of the internet right now

a government would simply block crypto traffic

Yes, but you generally can't build a business on top of an illegal industry that's closely scrutinized by law enforcement.

Already law enforcement agencies are campaigning hard against ransomware, and central banks and tax agencies investigating how people are using cryptocurrencies to launder money.

It doesn't mean it doesn't have value; it's just that the real expected value can't be expected to have legitimate businesses on top.

Certainly. But if one is going to argue about the value proposition of Web3, it may not be insane to postulate that in the future a large % of the world will live under regimes where the ability to interact with others illegally will be a strong value prop. (Not just financially, but in terms of speech, etc.)

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