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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Another reminder of what Bitcoin is good for. The article currently links to another one that says they froze 200 bank accounts and are now unfreezing most of them: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/emergency-bank-measures-fin... https://archive.fo/lAT62

It's a terrifying reminder of how vulnerable we've become to arbitrary and lawless government actions in our near-cashless society.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30446703

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Bitcoin won't help you here: you still need to convert things to fiat to get anything done. And if shops start taking Bitcoin, the government will simply regulate those payments as well.

Crypto doesn't exist in a vacuum.

In support of your position, this article:

https://sethforprivacy.com/posts/fungibility-graveyard/

Those are indeed very serious problems with Bitcoin, but they are not the problem the parent was talking about.

I disagree. the government can tell (and has told) everyone that certain bitcoins are radioactive, making it hard or even impossible to spend them. There was a Matt Levine article about bitcoin laundering. It is much harder than I thought.

how much harder. If Canadians government make some bitcoin radioactive i’m sure bitcoin trader in china would not mind giving me ETH in exchange for some bitcoin.

The problem is that, even if you think this is the kind of thing the government should be able to do, they haven't told me which ones are "radioactive". So if someone uses one of those bitcoins to buy something from me, I might have trouble spending it afterwards. Failures of fungibility like that are potentially a big problem for a currency. So far they're only a small problem for Bitcoin, but as these examples show, they have the potential to become significant. That might create pressure to move to a coin like ZCash, Monero, or Mimblewimble which has built-in safeguards against such things.

Holding your savings instead of entrusting them to a bank prevents the government from freezing them. If you try to do this in cash, you lose the ability to transmit them over the internet, and it's easy enough for burglars (or enterprising traffic-stop cops) to just walk away with your savings. Bitcoin allows you to hold your savings without losing the ability to spend them.

It's true that you still need to convert them to local currency to spend them, same as US dollar bills, which are the popular savings vehicle here in Argentina. Around here, mostly the same networks of illegal money-changers handle dollars, Bitcoin, and gold jewelry, though there are some that only handle one or two of these.

You still have a lot of options with crypto even without the exchanges. I pay for DNS and my VOIP service with it and could pay for a lot more if I had to.

how can government regulate bitcoin if shops start accepting it? Not saying they can’t but i’m just curious what this would mean.

It would not be the first time store decide to accept an unofficial currency

the us government creates an insane global appetite for us dollars. they regulate the exchange points, and it’s almost the same thing.

The US government definitely does not regulate the guy downtown who exchanges my dollars for pesos, except in the sense that they could place economic sanctions on him if they decided he was a "terrorist" or something.

you think the us government doesn’t tax the guy downtown in us dollars?

No, absolutely not. That's ridiculous. I live in Argentina.

Localmonero?

Bitcoin doesn’t “solve” what is essentially a human problem. No amount of encryption and obfuscation will stop a $5 wrench.

the 5$ wrench in this case is not a good analogy because there is no way to know who own a bitcoin wallet. Thus you don’t know who you should use the 5$ wrench on.

That's probably overstating the degree of security Bitcoin gives you in practice, but it's likely better than having a centralized list of names and account numbers.

Bitcoin does solve it (or, rather, people holding their savings themselves instead of lending them to a centralized intermediary does solve it). When everyone's savings are in the bank, you only have to use the $5 wrench on a single bank executive to take a million people's money. When everyone's savings are in their own possession, you have to use a million $5 wrenches on a million people, one at a time, to take their money, and you don't initially know which of those people has how much money.

I mean, yes, the government can still probably take your money, or for that matter kill you with impunity. But it's a good idea to put some obstacles in their way that aren't merely procedural.

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