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Comment by digitailor | Hacker News Reader

If your argument hinges on the premise that being either a police officer or a politician makes someone either a paragon of morality or wholly incapable of committing crimes, then I'm afraid I have some bad news for you.

My argument hinges upon the fact that Mr Nagle has been waging a FUD campaign for some time without much contest here, through leveraging his reputation. It's become tiresome, very few LEO support his concerns at this point, yet he continues unchallenged. It's mostly cherrypicking and well below the quality of his other posts.

All of us who've been around enough know what FUD campaigns look like on well-managed Internet forums. I am middle-aged and find this worthy of countering as it appears obsessive. Younger technologists are constantly having their efforts defamed needlessly on this leading technology forum with nothing being added to the conversation.

> Younger technologists are constantly having their efforts defamed needlessly on this leading technology forum with nothing being added to the conversation.

Speaking of nothing being added to the conversation, it’s somewhat conspicuous that you are attacking the source rather than engaging with the argument. His criticisms are valid and shared by many technologists of all ages and skill levels, surely you can explain why they’re mistaken — for example, you could point to extensive use of Bitcoin in a legitimate non-speculative economy. You’ve been promoting it for many years, surely you must have examples?

Indeed I have, appearing later in this thread due to how it became organized by moderation. Digital assets aided in stopping a predatory crime this year. If this kind of usage doesn't satisfy as a rebuttal to a negative parent post containing no supporting information, you may want to examine the fact that this entire thread is meant to explore some technologist's fear-based need to publicly associate digital assets with crime alone, in this forum especially. Emotionally-driven posts meant specifically to steam-roll any and all positive discussion by simply shouting "But Crime!"

Tracking the making of negative generalized statements using FUD techniques is something I have been involved in algorithmically tracking professionally and am countering not in the pursuit of karma or sycophantic agreement but simple public commons maintenance. (The data was often used to identify FUD campaigns of short sellers in finance forums and resulting sentiment analysis feeds are available via subscription through financial data providers.) These comments never mention the continual reigning supremacy of the US dollar for crime, ever, and never provide any evidence that bitcoin has a higher crime usage ratio than the dollar with less prosecutability. This is because law enforcement generally haven't advanced that position while enforcing and in earlier posts I've explained my extensive experience in detail as to how and why they haven't. There has been no direct engagement with this factual information.

In my view some on this forum are intent on spreading classical FUD on the subject and countering FUD is an occupation for some. After a decade of particularly questionable behavior coming from the technology sector involving unfathomable amounts of US dollars, we run the risk of portraying an image of incumbent ideological corruption instead of supporting meaningful technological discussion. This slide has been happening for years IMO and it saddens me. Younger technologists have considerably less opportunity than we did, not more, and the frontier is much smaller. Ruthless negativism doesn't serve them.

> Digital assets aided in stopping a predatory crime this year.

I saw you make that claim but that's too vague to evaluate whereas what Nagle described has been well covered for many years and even the Bitcoin salespeople rarely argue that it's commonplace. Even with the extra two paragraphs you added later there's no way to know what this meant, what fraction of the total Bitcoin usage it accounted for, etc.

> These comments never mention the continual reigning supremacy of the US dollar for crime, ever, and never provide any evidence that bitcoin has a higher crime usage ratio than the dollar with less prosecutability.

This is incorrect, and the need for the counterfactual narrative is telling: this comes up frequently and it's usually mentioned in the context of the larger economy. Nobody says that the U.S. dollar isn't used by criminals but it's trivially easy to show enormous amounts of real, non-criminal economic activity — nobody thinks, say, drug cartels are tiny but there's no serious argument that they're anywhere near a majority of the legal economy. If you want to address this claim, try highlighting examples of real economic activity using Bitcoin — real businesses which are not selling Bitcoin. If USD (or just Visa/Mastercard, Paypal, etc.) activity suddenly halted, a ton of people would be unable to engage in their daily business — can you provide any examples of similar Bitcoin dependencies?

> Younger technologists have considerably less opportunity than we did, not more, and the frontier is much smaller. Ruthless negativism doesn't serve them.

I agree that the landscape isn't as good as it used to be but I don't think it's helpful to steer people into false hopes, either. Bitcoin has an inherent conflict of interest built-in since all of the people who've poured money into it for the last decade will have to write that off if they can't find buyers. That lack of utility is the real problem and calling it FUD won't solve it.

I agree with most of your points. If something as real-life meaningful as the stopping of a predatory crime does not satisfy you as a legitimate usage example against people claiming there is essentially none, I'm at a loss and am unsure of what we're actually discussing.

As you may imagine, it's impossible for me to provide the 1,000 page+ documentation trail of an in-progress federal investigation here in order to refute a comment. I understand that my sincerity may be questioned and there's nothing I can do about that.

I'm sorry but as an observer to this thread: there is nothing even remotely compelling to your argument. 'stopping a predatory crime' - one instance? That you can't refer to? Not compelling.

In fact, the sheer number of predatory scams being performed using crypto would surely outweigh the alleged single incident in which Bitcoin had a positive influence?

Your inability to meet any other requests for evidence (businesses that legitimately use and depend on btc) is downright damning.

I hold btc, but every booster simply fails to demonstrate any actual utility for Bitcoin beyond being a speculative vehicle.

I do not hold any meaningful amount of btc. I am not selling bitcoin, I am countering FUD. there is not a single example of my intent in this thread being promotion or marketing. I'm pointing out classical FUD techniques on a public technology forum, not making an argument. There is zero desire to compel you. Your proclamation of damnation is noted here for posterity.

I'm specifically refusing the demand that it's my responsibility to provide evidence of commercial btc usage in order to highlight FUD tactics. The alleged story I mention is likely to receive media exposure in Q3 2022, and it's largely but not completely up to the target.

In your opinion the anecdotal story of aiding in the stopping of a predatory crime is not compelling and does not demonstrate meaningful utility. If you think every human agrees with you that is not compelling, I believe that is an extraordinary statement on your part.

The common hostile attitude here on the subject is what's being captured and addressed, and my response to it is what I'm specifically capturing in my comment history for posterity. It has utility.

>as it appears obsessive

Do you see the irony here?

That's a political publicity stunt, and does not counter any of the points made by the parent

Help me understand. Are you saying that former LEO are well-served from a PR standpoint by attaching themselves to the "points" you're holding are clearly evidenced by the parent post?

The parent post argues that cryptocurrency is most useful, in practice, for illegal activities. It does not argue that this is how it's perceived by the general public, by the NYC municipal government, or by Eric Adams. The perception is that it's a sexy new technology of the future, whereas the reality is that it's mostly a playground for "investors", fraudsters, and criminals.

I understand your point of view, but you haven't even attempted to qualify it.

I can tell you that I helped stop a predatory crime that was being committed using US dollars this year, partially by using digital assets defensively. Defamatory general statements about the target and digital assets had been made in the past in this case, and it backfired on the perpetrators- horribly, in the federal jurisdiction.

Could you take a moment to consider why unqualified generalizations like yours could concern some? In the past, the perpetrators had attempted to capitalize on the perception you are asserting as reality. The possibility of resultant ankle bracelets or worse for them is high, due generally to record keeping and time stamps.

The reality of this technology is that it solved the technical problems associated with Internet native asset classes. The rest is editorializing.

Yes, especially the ones that become politicians.

OK, I think I get it better. I'm not disagreeing and sincerely appreciate the cynicism, but you're saying the guy who ran on a relatively classic tough-on-crime platform is also appealing to some kind of criminal subclass of NYC voter who prefers bitcoin to cash for their locally committed crimes and also appreciates tough-on-crime platforms for everything else?

Perhaps... or maybe the reputation for crime that some people are intent on projecting onto bitcoin is not particularly accurate to the realities of currencies used most frequently in the commission of criminal activity.

(To help qualify my perspective and insistence... I was involved in stopping a long term predatory crime this year where digital assets were used to help protect the victim against perpetrators using dollars. As you might imagine, having clear records of transactions is likely to be more helpful to the targets than the perpetrators in these cases.)

You can use local heavies to protect yourself from bullies. That doesn't mean those heavies won't commit crimes in their spare time.

To be clear, I'm talking about the bookkeeping element of an in-progress federal investigation involving theft of corporate equity and corporate tax fraud. The target was legally disabled.

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