Hacker News Reader

Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

> The powers included the ability to freeze the accounts of those suspected of supporting the blockades, without obtaining a court order. Standing beside Trudeau, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said most of those accounts were in the process of being released.

> The aim of freezing the accounts was "to convince people who took part in the occupation and the illegal blockades to listen to reason," Freeland said, adding that the government had already asked banks to begin "to unfreeze these bank accounts."

Whatever you may think of the vaccine mandates and other Covid restrictions, I hope we can’t all agree that freezing assets without a court order to break the will of the protesters is an overreach. Imagine if they said you can’t spend cash in stores. I bet they would if they could.

Long term this is going to make for a lot of crypto enthusiasm.

View on HN

Obviously you don’t live in the us as I recall seizures due to “the war on drugs” occurring for decades. Police departments supposedly use it for funding, and you needed court action to get your cash/goods back.

Funding illegal activities always had repercussions for those involved.

I don't think any of those were account freezes, though, mostly civil asset forfeiture. Civil asset forfeiture is an abhorrent practice, but it is different than freezing someone's bank account.

I think it worse, as “I want my house back” is worse than “could you unfreeze my bank account”…

I would say they are different, not necessarily better or worse. In this case the target was political protesters who opposed the government.

Civil forfeiture is wrong, but targeting dissidents and threatening to make them economic non-persons is a different kind of chilling.

You can be against both.

> Q: What things can be forfeited?

> A: There are different legal theories of forfeiture. Property that the wrongdoer would not have had but for the crime can be forfeited as proceeds. For example, cash acquired through an unlawful activity such as drug dealing, or a car bought with cash from drug dealing can be forfeited under the proceeds theory. Property that makes the crime easier to commit or harder to detect is called facilitating property. For example, a house where drug sales occur can be forfeited under the facilitating theory.

Property that the wrongdoer would not have had but for the crime can be forfeited as proceeds. Does this get abused? Sure. But I don't think this includes a shop owner donating $50 to some cause having their entire bank account frozen.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdpa/divisions/asset-forfeiture

Doesn't the crypto enthusiasm from inside the US underscore the parent's point?

> Whatever you may think of the vaccine mandates and other Covid restrictions, I hope we can’t all agree that freezing assets without a court order to break the will of the protesters is an overreach.

That power is part of emergency authorizations, which have been given by the parliament to the executive precisely for the event that a situation is a severe threat to the stability of the nation.

> Long term this is going to make for a lot of crypto enthusiasm.

Highly doubt that, for a number of reasons:

- Crypto is showing right now with the price collapse as a reaction to the Ukraine invasion that it is not suitable as any kind of long-term storage

- people are growing skeptical about the ecological and economical impact of crypto coins. Just look at all the supply shortages for everything (CPUs, GPUs, RAM chips, even bulk storage) - people are sick of not being able to buy parts just because of cryptominers outmatching the market price. And the final nail in the coffin of public interest in crypto (other than NFTs, which were mostly celebrity-driven) were the news of people buying up coal plants to mine coins.

- the inevitable NFT crash will lead to a lot of people being burned off of crypto for a very long time - and without people to trade crypto with, the coins become effectively worthless.

- fundamentally, cryptocurrencies will always have to be converted back to fiat money at some point. And that's where the flow of money can be stopped at will of the government again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com