Even if I assume you're completely correct and that is a problem, they're still totally correct that cryptocurrencies are solving problems that almost nobody cares about.
That nobody cares does not imply that it doesn't matter.
I don't want to bash China specifically, it just happens to be the first example that comes to my mind. So for example nobody cares that millions of Uyghurs are being enslaved in China, but that does not imply that it is not important. (Or take the example of Assange I mentioned - nobody cares that the UK locked him away without good cause).
Also most people don't really care about economics or how money or the stock market works. They just find themselves suddenly with a devalued currency or out of a job.
This is a gross misunderstanding of both the current banking system (which is decentralized) and the degree to which using a slow database doesn’t prevent legal actions. Blockchains are very easy to monitor and censor: ideal for an authoritarian government to get a signed confession for every disapproved transaction you make, and a high-volume always-on network is trivially blocked should they care to.
With such a track record, you really think they could just "tap in" or "modify" any given crypto protocol so they could audit every transaction?
Give me a break.
Speaking of disingenuous, I feel compelled to note that the failure was built by the private sector (CGI Federal) and fixed by the government (Mikey Dickinson’s USDS team), and it’s certainly not like there aren’t plenty of failures in private industry. You can’t honestly say anything about an entire sector based on a single cherry-picked example. For example, should we look at the high level of skill shown by Stuxnet and similar government operations, compare it to Experian, and conclude that the private sector can’t operate computers securely?
> With such a track record, you really think they could just "tap in" or "modify" any given crypto protocol so they could audit every transaction?
A public transaction ledger means you’re giving them that with no work and there are blockchain analytics companies which already have government contracts even if you believe that civil servants can’t use computers.
Similarly, there’s a well documented history of governments monitoring network traffics, collecting forensics data from phones in police custody, installing malware on people’s phones or computers, etc. There’s a zero-percent chance that they would forget to check for cryptocurrency activity along with everything else.
I know that transactions on the Bitcon blockchain are public. There are approaches to fixing it and several altcoins claim to fix it. It certainly isn't the last iteration of the tech forever. And I think you can also do things to anonymize Bitcoin transactions. I haven't really dug into it yet.
The real fire test of governments attacking crypto coins has yet to happen, agreed. It won't be easy, but nothing will be easy under authoritarian control.
Banks follow laws, which is also a hard requirement for cryptocurrency businesses. Very, very few people are banned from having an account and those bans are of categories which would also prevent a cryptocurrency exchange in that country from working with them. Note also that “centralized” is only true within a governmental boundary — a bank in Zimbabwe doesn't phone someone in the U.S. to ask whether they should allow someone to open an account, which is why I described it as decentralized because it lacks a central authority.
It's true that someone can try to circumvent those measures, which is a practice dating bank centuries, but there's an important distinction between being able to make a transaction and being able to avoid punishment for doing so. Just as most censorship happens because someone is afraid of the potential consequences for speech rather than prior approval of all communications, it's both possible and a natural extension of existing practice to start demanding that people in your jurisdiction disallow any transactions linked to a particular address or to punish people for accepting a payment after it's linked to a criminal activity. You'll never get that down to zero but cryptocurrencies make it a lot easier to block than real cash payments.
This is also the problem with anonymization schemes: governments don't say “he used Monero, guess we have to give up on law enforcement” but rather “Monero does not comply with our financial laws, any business or person caught accepting it will be fined and risk jail time”. Bitcoin laundering schemes are unproven at scale from a powerful adversary but also simply using a tumbler is risky because you're publishing a durable record of using a service designed to evade legal controls — if that's ever linked back to you, you've given the police a signed confession that you knew what you were doing was illegal. Legitimate users aren't going to pay a premium to take on that risk — especially since it would open them to charges of collusion on whatever anyone else using that service was doing — and that removes legal traffic volume, making it easier for analysis and blocking.
Laws are not always just, and not everybody who is prosecuted by some government is a criminal. Governments can seize bank accounts.
You can be labeled a nazi for nothing these days, and then businesses (including banks) who do business with you will receive threats and shitstorms to make them stop doing business with you. It can happen quicker than you think. Maybe you are lucky that you live a private live and never dissent with anything. By "nothing" I mean literally nothing - my own Twitter account for example was shut down by a rampant bot that was triggered by mere keywords. Even on HN there are frequent stories about Google accounts and PayPal accounts being locked.
"governments don't say “he used Monero, guess we have to give up on law enforcement” but rather “Monero does not comply with our financial laws, any business or person caught accepting it will be fined and risk jail time”"
Sure, I worry about that kind of issue a lot, when I think about how to enable free speech in unfree countries. Should dissidents in authoritarian regimes just give up, and not use Encryption or Tor? It certainly seems dangerous, but what is the alternative? Also I suppose you could try using Monero without anybody knowing that you used it.
In any case, if the laws in your country become unbearable, you can memorize your crypto seeds and try to flee the country.
Yes, but that doesn't change the fact that there isn't a magical technological fix for that problem. Wanting something to be useful for dissidents doesn't make it so and it's irresponsible to tell them otherwise just because adoption would be personally profitable for you.
> You can be labeled a nazi for nothing these days
Do you have citations on “nothing”? The examples I've seen are all of people who were doing things most people find objectionable and they didn't get a blanket ban on banking or being online but rather a specific company chose not to associate with them. Even actual Nazis like Stormfront don't seem to stay offline for that long.
> Should dissidents in authoritarian regimes just give up, and not use Encryption or Tor? It certainly seems dangerous, but what is the alternative? Also I suppose you could try using Monero without anybody knowing that you used it.
Think about what trying Monero would mean: you'd have to be able to use a search engine to find a client, download it without triggering monitoring, hope that it's not actually a trojan left by the secret police, hope that it doesn't make identifying network traffic (always-on blockchain networks are easy to profile that way), figure out how to convert local currency into Monero and vice versa, etc. — and either do so perfectly forever or very carefully purge your history without leaving a trace.
It seems a lot less risky to avoid things with massive electronic footprints and focus on using cash and offline communications as much as possible, but really the key part is not overpromising. When sales people go around saying things which are not true about cryptocurrency, they're giving advice which is actively unsafe to follow — it'd be much better not to say anything at all rather than give a false sense of security.
Well there kind of is, at least Bitcoin is better than other things in some regards.
"Do you have citations on “nothing”? The examples I've seen are all of people who were doing things most people find objectionable and they didn't get a blanket ban on banking or being online but rather a specific company chose not to associate with them. Even actual Nazis like Stormfront don't seem to stay offline for that long."
I don't really keep score. An example that comes to mind is JK Rowling being disinvited from the anniversary celebration of the Harry Potter movies for saying "Transwomen are not women". Or Gina Carano being fired from the Mandalorian for warning about singling out people using a picture of the Holocaust. It's not a blanket ban, but the proponents of cancel culture are generally pushing for blanket bans. They will write letters to employers and business partners (including banks) of people they want to destroy and ask them to fire/stop doing business with them. Are you sure your employer and bank will double check such claims before firing you?
(Edit: here is an example of a bank cancelling the account of a feminist organisation for saying the same thing as JK Rowling - https://www.rebelnews.com/dutch_banking_service_terminates_f... )
An example for banks messing up stuff, PayPal freezing Wikileaks bank account: https://www.wired.com/2010/12/paypal-wikileaks/
Where does Stormfront hosts their servers? Parler took a long time to get back online, but maybe they wanted to overhaul their tech first.
And more and more frequently it will just be bots that brand you a nazi. As I said, I was banned from Twitter by a bot misinterpreting some keywords ("hopefully" and "die" appearing in the same tweet - at least that is the only explanation I can find, as they disallow things like "I hope you die", but that was not the content of my tweet). And the beauty of banning people from social media is that nobody can check why it happened anymore, so people will just assume that "there must have been a reason".
"Think about what trying Monero would mean"
As I said, life under authoritarian regimes won't be easy either way. I don't defend all the sales people saying stuff about crypto coins. Some of it is true, some of it is bullshit. Just because some people tell nonsense, doesn't make all of it wrong.