Comment by hnthrow1010 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hnthrow1010 | Hacker News Reader

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A couple things wrong with that.

- They were "economically de-personed" because the protest was deemed illegal. All governments have the ability to "economically de-person" someone by arresting and jailing them. Cryptocurrencies do not and cannot change this, when they arrest you they'll take away your wallet and your computer and your phone. If you really do take issue with this, start working on the problem of how to make fairer protest laws. Start working on government accountability systems. The problem is political and needs political solutions. There is no other way. Trying to invent a new tech to fix political problems is largely not going to solve anything and probably will make the problem worse.

- If by some chance this wasn't an issue, cryptocurrency is still not "uncensorable money" by any possible definition. Among other things, you lose access to all of it simply by losing your internet connection. Cash doesn't suffer from this disadvantage.

Seriously, this meme about blockchains being "uncensorable" needs to die. At best it is technical confusion, at worst it is a lie and grift coming from con men trying to trick you into "investing" in something that can never fulfill the promise.

> Seriously, this meme about blockchains being "uncensorable" needs to die.

Agreed. Cabals of crypto exchanges maintain blocklists of wallets. Eth did a hardfork to recover the stolen DAO money. Most blockchains mempools are an unincentivized piece of infrastructure that if not properly decentralized could censor transactions.

In fact voting on hard and even soft forks is a form of blockchain transaction censorship. Every node/miner/validator/walletapp — every actor in the system - decides whether a transaction is “legal.”

Not to mention most if not all crypto is incapable of running a full node or whatever is necessary for full network participation on phones, so if you are using crypto for mobile transactions you’re probably talking to an intermediary API that can censor your transaction.

For most users, crypto has can be functionally censored by a wide range of actors.

People already use crypto for exactly the reason he gave despite it being illegal. See also buying/selling drugs.

Access to money is also quite important in fighting unjust laws, even if we'd wish otherwise.

They can use it for that reason, it doesn't mean that blockchains are actually solving that problem. It only means regulators haven't caught up to them yet. A lot of drug transactions still appear to be made in cash.

>Access to money is also quite important in fighting unjust laws

Apparently not, as I have seen approximately none of that happening in cryptocurrency. It's almost all scams, i.e. people trying to fight against just laws that say you can't scam.

Uh, yeah. If you don't believe money is important for political change then we're not going to see eye to eye. Renting a hall, travelling to a protest, hosting a website, printing a pamphlet, all costs money. Denying someone the freedom to transact is a very effective way of silencing them, which is why Trudeau literally did it.

We clearly don't occupy the same universe.

That has absolutely nothing to do with what I said. Again, if the government really doesn't want you to rent a hall or host a website, they'll just arrest you. I really don't know how you draw the line from that to saying "the solution is to transact in these virtual casino tokens", if you could explain that then maybe I'd be able to understand your "universe".

> That has absolutely nothing to do with what I said

You literally contradicted the statement that money is important for political change. Maybe you wish you didn't say that, but you did.

> Again, if the government really doesn't want you to rent a hall or host a website, they'll just arrest you.

They could also have gunned down all the protestors, but they weren't willing to do that. Obviously if you believe the government will escalate endlessly then that changes the equation.

Sorry, but I don't think you're cut out for this conversation, and I don't like it when people try to rewrite arguments they made mere minutes earlier. Have a great day.

Actually no, you're way off here in multiple ways. My statement from the beginning was that political solutions are required for political problems. "Money for political solutions" is usually described as "lobbying" and most activists I've talked to would consider too much unrestricted lobbying to be bad. Maybe you can understand that sometimes money is actually bad for political change.

You are appealing to authority. I am appealing to math. Technical solutions > Political Solutions. Encryption is strong. PoW Hash is unforgeable.

It is uncensorable. Please explain how you will prevent me from signing an ECDSA message and broadcasting it to a public swarm.

Yes you need an internet connection.

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