Source: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/blog/date/2022/html/ecb.blog...
(also some legal ones, tho)
It's a feature, obviously. Why is "useful for illegal transactions" supposed to be a bad thing, when these illegal transactions are illegal for extremely dubious reasons?
Ofc it's bad from the perspective of the people who want control over you. Good.
Not being allowed to buy/possess drugs is a stupid law, but preventing illegal transactions in the public financial system is a feature, not a bug. If you want to buy drugs, do it the old fashioned way - you know, the way society did it for thousands of years prior to bitcoin.
A scam transaction is one where one party would not have committed said transaction had they known the truth. It is an unwilling transaction (aka, scam).
An illegal transaction is one where both parties are willing, but the state deems said transaction is illegal under their purview. I argue that there should be no such a type of transaction - the state should allow _all_ transactions from _all_ parties that are willing. The illegal part should only apply to an action resulting from the transaction, such as hitman for hire.
e.g, The act of paying someone to kill someone else is legal, but the act of killing is illegal. The act of paying someone for an illicit drug is legal, but possession is illegal.
Why should it be legal to pay somebody to kill? That seems insane to me. Especially since the laws in many countries could/would hold financial institutions liable for any murder they inadvertently facilitated by processing that transaction. If it wasn’t disallowed by the state, the private institutions would prohibit it of their own accord. What’s the difference?
There are also many laws regarding incitement to violence and the like. Paying a hit man would be that, no?
“I don’t want the government to tell me what to do” is childish. Tell me why a society should tolerate the ability to pay for a hitman if we’ve already agreed that murder is wrong?
Why? Why is it better to actively facilitate the act of paying an assassin than it is to not do that?
> if we lived in a society where all flow of money goes through some govement entity
Lovely strawman you've built there. However, I don't think I claimed that all money should flow through some government entity. For the record, I don't think it should. Making the act of paying for an assassination illegal != making some government entity responsible for the flow of all money. Holding both the assassin and the payer responsible for either killing somebody or conspiring to kill somebody doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
> we would be in reality some button presses away from Orwell style dystopia.
[citation needed] go work in government and then tell me that anything is "some button presses away" from anything else.
for assassinations, may be we currently all agree that it isn't good to allow it to happen. However, that is only just an extreme example, for which it is something most people would agree should be illegal. But what about other actions?
Killing the ability to transact, regardless of the subject of a transaction, is detrimental to change, and entrenches existing powers/authority. These existing authority should not feel safe implementing new laws, if there are ways that could circumvent them. This makes the authority remain honest, and only implement laws that would have popular support.
You have successfully convinced me that you’re either a parody account or GPT-4 in training. This is insane.
Yes - legally this is fraud.
> An illegal transaction is one where both parties are willing, but the state deems said transaction is illegal under their purview.
And in every single place I know of in the world, fraud is illegal.
Don't waste our time with this.
The discussion in this HN thread has been calling both of the above "illegal", and not distinguishing between them.
IANAL but paying someone to kill someone else is definitely illegal, even if they don't kill them. Isn't that what they got the silk road guy on?
today, yes, the transaction for paying the hitman is illegal, as is the act of the hitman.
What i'm saying is that bitcoins could be a method for which transactions can be made without interference with the state, regardless of the subject of the transaction.
The legality of the transaction's subject is a separate argument.
Is this parody?
The first opium war started in 1839, so even in China, "not quite two centuries" is much more accurate than "centuries at least".
A good argument could be made that these substances weren't really banned in the US until the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. The word "decades" is pretty reasonable.
> If you want to buy drugs, do it the old fashioned way - you know, the way society did it for thousands of years prior to bitcoin.
I’m more making the case that you should just go buy drugs with cash instead of pretending that bitcoin is the only way to do it.
Because some illegal transactions are illegal for very non-dubious reasons, but crypto doesn't make this distinction. (Crypto made ransomware a profitable endeavor.)
Same with cash. Which governments increasingly constrain, for this reason.
Yet there are not as many people commenting enthusiastically about wanting cash to disappear / fail, or suggesting similar measures against it. (KYC, AML...)
Why is cash okay, but _digital equivalent_ is not? When physical transactions are less and less relevant? Why make the decision to basically leave these advantages in the past?
I don't think preventing ransomware attacks or financing terrorism is worth losing the capability to transact freely online. Potential totalitarianism is way more scary than 9/11.
Quote from a book, "Manna":
> With the arrival of robots, tens of millions of people lost their minimum wage jobs and the wealth concentrated so quickly. The rich controlled America’s bureaucracy, military, businesses and natural resources, and the unemployed masses lived in terrafoam, cut off from any opportunity to change their situation. There was the facade of “free elections,” but only candidates supported by the rich could ever get on the ballot. The government was completely controlled by the rich, as were the robotic security forces, the military and the intelligence organizations. American democracy had morphed into a third world dictatorship ruled by the wealthy elite.
> Ultimately, you would expect that there would be riots across America. But the people could not riot. The terrorist scares at the beginning of the century had caused a number of important changes. Eventually, there were video security cameras and microphones covering and recording nearly every square inch of public space in America. There were taps on all phone conversations and Internet messages sniffing for terrorist clues. If anyone thought about starting a protest rally or a riot, or discussed any form of civil disobedience with anyone else, he was branded a terrorist and preemptively put in jail. Combine that with robotic security forces, and riots are impossible.
Because exchanging cash requires physical presence. The introduces friction and requires putative criminals to take risks that they don't have to take with crypto, which makes crime less lucrative.
Crypto is not a digital equivalent to cash no matter how much you say it.
I can pay my tax organisation with cash. They explicitly list the acceptable forms of payment. I cannot send them any sort of crypto currency. Cash is also legal tender. There are times where not accepting cash could have legal consequences. I can reject crypto as much as I want.
I can't help but think these lines of argument are intentionally deceptive. If you just repeat it enough times, other people will as well.
Straw man based on a made-up quote. The article does not mention "useful for illegal transactions" anywhere. The article mentions legal transactions in only two occasions:
- "Bitcoin is rarely used for legal transactions"
- "Bitcoin has never been used to any significant extent for legal real-world transactions."
If you feel the need to refute what the ECB claimed, show where bitcoing is used in any significant extent for legal real-world transactions.
Not even El Salvador, with their push to adopt Bitcoin as the nation's official currency, Bitcoin transactions saw any significant uptake.
"If nothing’s wrong with your country’s financial or political system, then you don’t need crypto. If you use crypto anyway, it will be worse than your regular financial system, because it’s trading off many things you need (efficiency, speed, safety, the good kinds of regulation) for something you don’t need (avoiding the bad kinds of regulation)."
The current head of the ECB, Christine Lagarde, stated this year that "inflation came from nowhere". And this is your source of information on this topic?
It's like referencing a study on climate change by a fossil fuel producer in the 80s.